arXiv subjects

Konstantin Beyer

Publications and source records attributed to Konstantin Beyer.

16 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Quantum memory precludes mixed-unitary dynamics

Unital quantum channels, defined by their property of leaving the maximally mixed state invariant, form an important class of quantum operations. A distinguished subset of these channels can be represented as a probabilistic mixture of unitary evolutions. Characterizing channels that do not admit such a decomposition is in general a hard problem with significant implications for noise mitigation in quantum technologies and for fundamental problems in quantum information theory. Here we establish a link between mixed-unitarity of unital channels and the (quantum) nature of the memory effects in non-Markovian dynamics. Translating the problem into the language of process tensors, this connection yields a hierarchy of semidefinite programs that provides numerically efficient witnesses for non-mixed-unitary behavior, outperforming existing criteria. We demonstrate the power of this approach through illustrative examples of unital channels in dimensions three and four.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2026

Hardware-Agnostic Modeling of Quantum Side-Channel Leakage via Conditional Dynamics and Learning from Full Correlation Data

We study a sequential coherent side-channel model in which an adversarial probe qubit interacts with a target qubit during a hidden gate sequence. Repeating the same hidden sequence for $N$ shots yields an empirical \emph{full-correlation record}: the joint histogram $\widehat{P}_g(b)$ over probe bit-strings $b\in\{0,1\}^k$, which is a sufficient statistic for classical post-processing under identically and independently distributed (i.i.d.)\ shots but grows exponentially with circuit depth. We first describe this sequential probe framework in a coupling- and measurement-agnostic form, emphasizing the scaling of the observation space and why exact analytic distinguishability becomes intractable with circuit depth. We then specialize to a representative instantiation (a controlled-rotation probe coupling with fixed projective readout and a commuting $R_x$ gate alphabet) where we (i) derive a depth-dependent leakage envelope whose maximizer predicts a coupling band as a function of depth {if the measurement data is reduced to marginal statistics}, and (ii) provide an operational decoder, via machine learning, a single parameter-conditioned map from $\widehat{P}_g$ to Alice's per-step gate labels, generalizing across coupling and noise settings without retraining.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2025

$^{208}$Pb nuclear charge radius revisited: closing the fine-structure-anomaly gap

A comprehensive reevaluation of the root-mean-square nuclear charge radius is presented for the doubly magic $^{208}$Pb extracted from muonic spectroscopy measurements. By integrating rigorous theoretical quantum electrodynamics calculations, state-of-the-art numerical methods, and a systematic reanalysis of the uncertainties, we reduced the long-standing muonic fine-structure anomaly and improved the goodness of fit by a factor of twenty. The resulting value of 5.5062(5)~fm for a Fermi distribution is fairly consistent with the previously reported muonic spectroscopy value, and three standard deviations larger than the commonly used compilation data, which indicates that the current value and its uncertainty could be significantly underestimated. Attributing the remaining discrepancy to theory errors which can not be rigorously calculated we suggest the rms charge radius with reduced model dependence to be 5.5062(17) fm. This work sets an improved benchmark for charge radius extraction in heavy nuclei and paves a path for systematic reevaluations across the nuclear chart.

physics.atom-ph↗

arXiv2025

Operational work fluctuation theorem for open quantum systems

The classical Jarzynski equality establishes an exact relation between the stochastic work performed on a system driven out of thermal equilibrium and the free energy difference in a corresponding quasi-static process. This fluctuation theorem bears experimental relevance, as it enables the determination of the free energy difference through the measurement of externally applied work in a nonequilibrium process. In the quantum case, the Jarzynski equality only holds if the measurement procedure of the stochastic work is drastically changed: it is replaced by a so-called two-point measurement (TPM) scheme that requires the knowledge of the initial and final Hamiltonian and therefore lacks the predictive power for the free energy difference that the classical Jarzynski equation is known for. Here, we propose a quantum fluctuation theorem that is valid for externally measurable quantum work determined during the driving protocol. In contrast to the TPM case, the theorem also applies to open quantum systems and the scenario can be realized without knowing the system Hamiltonian. Our fluctuation theorem comes in the form of an inequality and therefore only yields bounds to the true free energy difference. The inequality is saturated in the quasiclassical case of vanishing energy coherences at the beginning and at the end of the protocol. Thus, there is a clear quantum disadvantage.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2025

A One-sided Witness for the Quantumness of Gravitational Dynamics

Quantum information concepts and quantum technologies have opened the prospect to probe quantum gravity in table-top experiments. Many proposals rely on witnessing entanglement generation as a means to probe whether gravity is a quantum channel. Here we formulate a different and conclusive indirect test of the quantum nature of the gravitational interaction. Our witness is based on the concept of verifiable quantum memory in the dynamics of a quantum system. This allows us to assess the quantumness of an interaction between two systems by local measurements on one subsystem only. Our approach enables the first one-sided verification of the quantum nature of gravity, and provides a quantum signature of the interaction that is not fully covered by existing proposals. Our results open novel ways to witnessing the quantum nature of gravity in table-top experiments and clarify how {decisive tests can be designed even with measurements on only the probe system

quant-ph↗

arXiv2025

Entropic witness for quantum memory in open system dynamics

The dynamics of open quantum system are often modeled by non-Markovian processes that account for memory effects arising from interactions with the environment. It is well-known that the memory provided by the environment can be classical or quantum in nature. Remarkably, the quantumness of the memory can be witnessed locally by measurements on the open system alone, without requiring access to the environment. However, existing witnesses are computationally challenging for systems beyond qubits. In this work, we present a tractable criterion for quantum memory based on the von Neumann entropy, which is easily computable for systems of any dimension. Using this witness, we investigate the nature of memory in a class of physically motivated finite-dimensional qudit dynamics. Moreover, we demonstrate that this criterion is also suitable for detecting quantum memory in continuous-variable systems. As an illustrative example, we analyze non-Markovian Gaussian dynamics of a damped harmonic oscillator.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2024

Regularization of Riemannian optimization: Application to process tomography and quantum machine learning

Gradient descent algorithms on Riemannian manifolds have been used recently for the optimization of quantum channels. In this contribution, we investigate the influence of various regularization terms added to the cost function of these gradient descent approaches. Motivated by Lasso regularization, we apply penalties for large ranks of the quantum channel, favoring solutions that can be represented by as few Kraus operators as possible. We apply the method to quantum process tomography and a quantum machine learning problem. Suitably regularized models show faster convergence of the optimization as well as better fidelities in the case of process tomography. Applied to quantum classification scenarios, the regularization terms can simplify the classifying quantum channel without degrading the accuracy of the classification, thereby revealing the minimum channel rank needed for the given input data.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2024

Local disclosure of quantum memory in non-Markovian dynamics

Non-Markovian processes may arise in physics due to memory effects of environmental degrees of freedom. For quantum non-Markovianity, it is an ongoing debate to clarify whether such memory effects have a verifiable quantum origin, or whether they might equally be modeled by a classical memory. In this contribution, we propose a criterion to test locally for a truly quantum memory. The approach is agnostic with respect to the environment, as it solely depends on the local dynamics of the system of interest. Experimental realizations are particularly easy, as only single-time measurements on the system itself have to be performed. We study memory in a variety of physically motivated examples, both for a time-discrete case, and for time-continuous dynamics. For the latter, we are able to provide an interesting class of non-Markovian master equations with classical memory that allows for a physically measurable quantum trajectory representation.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2024

Dynamics of a strongly coupled quantum heat engine -- computing bath observables from the hierarchy of pure states

We present a fully quantum dynamical treatment of a quantum heat engine and its baths based on the Hierarchy of Pure States (HOPS), an exact and general method for open quantum system dynamics. We show how the change of the bath energy and the interaction energy can be determined within HOPS, for arbitrary coupling strength and smooth time dependence of the modulation protocol. The dynamics of all energetic contributions during the operation can be carefully examined both, in its initial transient phase and also later, in its periodic steady state. A quantum Otto engine with a qubit as inherently nonlinear work medium is studied in a regime where the energy associated with the interaction Hamiltonian plays an important role for the global energy balance and, thus, must not be neglected when calculating its power and efficiency. We confirm that the work required to drive the coupling with the baths depends sensitively on the speed of the modulation protocol. Remarkably, departing from the conventional scheme of well-separated phases by allowing for temporal overlap, we discover that one can even gain energy from the modulation of the bath interactions. We visualize these various work contributions using the analogue of state change diagrams of thermodynamic cycles. We offer a concise, full presentation of HOPS with its extension to bath observables, as it serves as a universal tool for the numerically exact description of general quantum dynamical (thermodynamic) scenarios far from the weak-coupling limit.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2022

Joint measurability in nonequilibrium quantum thermodynamics

In this Letter we investigate the concept of quantum work and its measurability from the viewpoint of quantum measurement theory. Very often, quantum work and fluctuation theorems are discussed in the framework of projective two-point measurement (TPM) schemes. According to a well known no-go theorem, there is no work observable which satisfies both (i) an average work condition and (ii) the TPM statistics for diagonal input states. Such projective measurements represent a restrictive class among all possible measurements. It is desirable, both from a theoretical and experimental point of view, to extend the scheme to the general case including suitably designed unsharp measurements. This shifts the focus to the question what information about work and its fluctuations one is able to extract from such generalized measurements. We show that the no-go theorem no longer holds if the observables in a TPM scheme are jointly measurable for any intermediate unitary evolution. We explicitly construct a model with unsharp energy measurements and derive bounds for the visibility that ensure joint measurability. In such an unsharp scenario a single work measurement apparatus can be constructed that allows us to determine the correct average work and to obtain free energy differences with the help of a Jarzynski equality.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2022

Quantum Steering on IBMQ

We use contemporary quantum computers to experimentally investigate quantum steering ofan open quantum system by measurements on its environment. On three IBMQ processors wedistinguish a qubit as the open system and perform pairwise interactions with multiple environmentancillas, following a collision model approach. Different measurement strategies on the ancillaslead to different state ensembles of the open system, which are reconstructed by employing statetomography. The amount of steering within the resulting assemblages is quantified with the help of asemidefinite program. We successfully observe the presence of quantum steering in our experimentalsimulations, and can discriminate the different performance qualities and noise levels of the selectedquantum devices.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2021

Quantum memory enhanced dissipative entanglement creation in non-equilibrium steady states

This Article investigates dissipative preparation of entangled non-equilibrium steady states (NESS). We construct a collision model where the open system consists of two qubits which are coupled to heat reservoirs with different temperatures. The baths are modeled by sequences of qubits interacting with the open system. The model can be studied in different dynamical regimes: with and without environmental memory effects. We report that only a certain bath temperature range allows for entangled NESS. Furthermore, we obtain minimal and maximal critical values for the heat current through the system. Surprisingly, quantum memory effects play a crucial role in the long time limit. First, memory effects broaden the parameter region where quantum correlated NESS may be dissipatively prepared and, secondly, they increase the attainable concurrence. Most remarkably, we find a heat current range that does not only allow but guarantees that the NESS is entangled. Thus, the heat current can witness entanglement of non-equilibrium steady states.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2020

Work as an external quantum observable and an operational quantum work fluctuation theorem

We propose a definition of externally measurable quantum work in driven systems. Work is given as a quantum observable on a control device which is forcing the system and can be determined without knowledge of the system Hamiltonian $H_\mathcal{S}$. We argue that quantum work fluctuation theorems which rely on the knowledge of $H_\mathcal{S}$ are of little practical relevance, contrary to their classical counterparts. Using our framework, we derive a fluctuation theorem which is operationally accessible and could in principle be implemented in experiments to determine bounds on free energy differences of unknown systems.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2019

Steering heat engines: a truly quantum Maxwell demon

We address the question of verifying the quantumness of thermal machines. A Szilárd engine is truly quantum if its work output cannot be described by a local hidden state (LHS) model, i. e. an objective local statistical ensemble. Quantumness in this scenario is revealed by a steering-type inequality which bounds the classically extractable work. A quantum Maxwell demon can violate that inequality by exploiting quantum correlations between the work medium and the thermal environment. While for a classical Szilárd engine an objective description of the medium always exists, any such description can be ruled out by a steering task in a truly quantum case.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2018

Analytical estimates of proton acceleration in laser-produced turbulent plasmas

With the advent of high power lasers, new opportunities have opened up for simulating astrophysical processes in the laboratory. We show that 2nd-order Fermi acceleration can be directly investigated at the National Ignition Facility, Livermore. This requires measuring the momentum-space diffusion of 3 MeV protons produced within a turbulent plasma generated by a laser. Treating Fermi acceleration as a biased diffusion process, we show analytically that a measurable broadening of the initial proton distribution is then expected for particles exiting the plasma.

astro-ph.HE↗

arXiv2018

Collision model approach to steering of an open driven qubit

We investigate quantum steering of an open quantum system by measurements on its environment in the framework of collision models. As an example we consider a coherently driven qubit dissipatively coupled to a bath. We construct local non-adaptive and adaptive as well as nonlocal measurement scenarios specifying explicitly the measured observable on the environment. Our approach shows transparently how the conditional evolution of the open system depends on the type of the measurement scenario and the measured observables. These can then be optimized for steering. The nonlocal measurement scenario leads to maximal violation of the used steering inequality at zero temperature. Further, we investigate the robustness of the constructed scenarios against thermal noise. We find generally that steering becomes harder at higher temperatures. Surprisingly, the system can be steered even when bipartite entanglement between the system and individual subenvironments vanishes.

quant-ph↗