Information and Symmetry

Vincenzo Manca, Vincenzo Bonnici

Hiroyasu Tajima, Keiji Saito

Quantum information is scrambled via a chaotic time evolution in many-body systems. Clarifying how and to what extent we can recover the quantum information from the scrambled state is a central issue of today's physics, since it commonly appears as an essential factor in various topics including irreversibility of quantum chaotic dynamics, fault-tolerant quantum computation, and black hole information paradox. In realistic settings, symmetry can ubiquitously exist in scrambling dynamics. Here we establish fundamental limitations on the information recovery arising from the Lie group symmetries in the scrambling dynamics. The results are applicable to many situations, including the Hayden-Preskill black hole model with symmetry where the success rate of the information recovery qualitatively changes from the original no-symmetry case. Our findings show a close relationship between information recovery, symmetry, and quantum coherence, and that symmetry hinders the quantum information recovery.

Yoshifumi Nakata, Eyuri Wakakuwa, Masato Koashi

The Hayden-Preskill protocol is a qubit-toy model of the black hole information paradox. Based on the assumption of scrambling, it was revealed that quantum information is instantly leaked out from the quantum many-body system that models a black hole. In this paper, we extend the protocol to the case where the system has symmetry and investigate how the symmetry affects the leakage of information. We especially focus on the conservation of the number of up-spins. Developing a partial decoupling approach, we first show that the symmetry induces a delay of leakage and an information remnant. We then clarify the physics behind them: the delay is characterized by thermodynamic properties of the system associated with the symmetry, and the information remnant is closely related to the symmetry-breaking of the initial state. These relations bridge the information leakage problem to macroscopic physics of quantum many-body systems and allow us to investigate the information leakage only in terms of physical properties of the system.

Ian T. Durham, Dean P. Rickles

J. C. G. Lesurf

Yujie Liu, Wen-Tao Xu, Frank Pollmann +1 more

Higher-form symmetries act on subdimensional spatial manifolds of a quantum system. They can emerge as an exact symmetry at low energies even when they are explicitly broken at the microscopic level, making them difficult to characterize. In this work, we propose that the emergence of 1-form symmetries is information-theoretic in nature, characterized by the preservation of information about a specific bare (microscopic) 1-form symmetry. As a consequence, the loss of the emergent 1-form symmetry is an information-theoretic transition which we argue to be revealed from the long-range entanglement in the ensemble of post-measurement states. We analytically determine the regimes in which a 1-form symmetry emerges in product states on one- and two-dimensional lattices. In analytically intractable regimes, we demonstrate how to efficiently detect 1-form symmetries with a global quantum error correction (QEC) decoder and numerically examine the information-theoretic transition of the 1-form symmetry, including systems with Z 2 topological order. As a practical application of our framework, we show that once the 1-form symmetry is detected to exist, a topological quantum phase transition characterized by the spontaneous breaking of the 1-form symmetry can be accurately determined by a disorder parameter. We further argue that our proposed theory for emergent 1-form symmetries offers new perspectives on particle condensation and suggests sharp information-theoretic phase boundaries between Higgs and confining regimes in the Z 2 lattice gauge theory.