arXiv subjects

Sarang Gopalakrishnan

Publications and source records attributed to Sarang Gopalakrishnan.

At least 55 records · Page 3Linked to original sources

arXiv2025

Metrology of open quantum systems from emitted radiation

We explore the task of learning about the dynamics of a Markovian open quantum system by monitoring the information it radiates into its environment. For an open system with Hilbert space dimension $D$, the quantum state of the emitted radiation can be described as a temporally ordered matrix-product state (MPS). We provide simple analytical expressions for the quantum Fisher information (QFI) of the radiation state, which asymptotically scales linearly with the sensing time unless the open system has multiple steady states. We characterize the crossovers in QFI near dynamical phase transitions, emphasizing the role of temporal correlations in setting the asymptotic rate at which QFI increases. We discuss when optimal sensing is possible with instantaneously measured radiation.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2025

Charge and Spin Sharpening Transitions on Dynamical Quantum Trees

The dynamics of monitored systems can exhibit a measurement-induced phase transition (MIPT) between entangling and disentangling phases, tuned by the measurement rate. When the dynamics obeys a continuous symmetry, the entangling phase further splits into a fuzzy phase and a sharp phase based on the scaling of fluctuations of the symmetry charge. While the sharpening transition for Abelian symmetries is well understood analytically, no such understanding exists for the non- Abelian case. In this work, building on a recent analytical solution of the MIPT on tree-like circuit architectures (where qubits are repatedly added or removed from the system in a recursive pattern), we study entanglement and sharpening transitions in monitored dynamical quantum trees obeying U (1) and SU (2) symmetries. The recursive structure of tree tensor networks enables powerful analytical and numerical methods to determine the phase diagrams in both cases. In the U (1) case, we analytically derive a Fisher-KPP-like differential equation that allows us to locate the critical point and identify its properties. We find that the entanglement/purification and sharpening transitions generically occur at distinct measurement rates. In the SU (2) case, we find that the fuzzy phase is generic, and a sharp phase is possible only in the limit of maximal measurement rate. In this limit, we analytically solve the boundaries separating the fuzzy and sharp phases, and find them to be in agreement with exact numerical simulations.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2025

Subdiffusive transport in the Fredkin dynamical universality class

We identify a pseudolocal conserved charge in the Fredkin and Motzkin quantum spin chains and explore its consequences for the hydrodynamics of systems with Fredkin- or Motzkin-type kinetic constraints. We use this quantity to formulate an exact upper bound ${\cal O}(L^{-5/2})$ on the gap of the Fredkin and Motzkin spin chains. Our results establish that transport in kinetically constrained dynamical systems with Fredkin or Motzkin constraints is subdiffusive, with dynamical exponent $z \geq 5/2$.

cond-mat.stat-mech↗

arXiv2025

Mixed-state learnability transitions in monitored noisy quantum dynamics

We consider learnability transitions in monitored quantum systems that undergo noisy evolution, subject to a global strong symmetry -- i.e., in addition to the measuring apparatus, the system can interact with an unobserved environment, but does not exchange charge with it. As in the pure-state setting, we find two information-theoretic phases -- a sharp (fuzzy) phase in which an eavesdropper can rapidly (slowly) learn the symmetry charge. However, because the dynamics is noisy, both phases can be simulated efficiently using tensor networks. Indeed, even when the true dynamics is unitary, introducing noise by hand allows an eavesdropper to efficiently learn the symmetry charge from local measurements, as we demonstrate. We identify the fuzzy phase in this setting as a mixed-state phase that exhibits spontaneous strong-to-weak symmetry breaking.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2025

Vortex Motion Induced Losses in Tantalum Resonators

Tantalum (Ta) based superconducting circuits have been demonstrated to enable record qubit coherence times and quality factors, motivating a careful study of the microscopic origin of the remaining losses that limit their performance. We have recently shown that the losses in Ta-based resonators are dominated by two-level systems (TLSs) at low microwave powers and millikelvin temperatures. We also observe that some devices exhibit loss that is exponentially activated at a lower temperature inconsistent with the superconducting critical temperature (Tc) of the constituent film. Specifically, dc resistivity measurements show a Tc of over 4 K, while microwave measurements of resonators fabricated from these films show losses that increase exponentially with temperature with an activation energy as low as 0.3 K. Here, we present a comparative study of the structural and thermodynamic properties of Ta-based resonators and identify vortex motion-induced loss as the source of thermally activated microwave loss. Through careful magnetoresistance and x-ray diffraction measurements, we observe that the increased loss occurs for films that are in the clean limit, where the superconducting coherence length is shorter than the mean free path. Vortex motion-induced losses are suppressed for films in the dirty limit, which show evidence of structural defects that can pin vortices. We verify this hypothesis by explicitly pinning vortices via patterning and find that we can suppress the loss by microfabrication.

cond-mat.supr-con↗

arXiv2025

Conditional Mutual Information and Information-Theoretic Phases of Decohered Gibbs States

Classical and quantum Markov networks -- including Gibbs states of commuting local Hamiltonians -- are characterized by the vanishing of conditional mutual information (CMI) between spatially separated subsystems. Adding local dissipation to a Markov network turns it into a \emph{hidden Markov network}, in which CMI is not guaranteed to vanish even at long distances. The onset of long-range CMI corresponds to an information-theoretic mixed-state phase transition, with far-ranging implications for teleportation, decoding, and state compressions. Little is known, however, about the conditions under which dissipation can generate long-range CMI. In this work we provide the first rigorous results in this direction. We establish that CMI in high-temperature Gibbs states subject to local dissipation decays exponentially, (i) for classical Hamiltonians subject to arbitrary local transition matrices, and (ii) for commuting local Hamiltonians subject to unital channels that obey certain mild restrictions. Conversely, we show that low-temperature hidden Markov networks can sustain long-range CMI. Our results establish the existence of finite-temperature information-theoretic phase transitions even in models that have no finite-temperature thermodynamic phase transitions. We also show several applications in quantum information and many-body physics.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2025

Correlations, Spectra and Entanglement Transitions in Ensembles of Matrix Product States

We investigate ensembles of Matrix Product States (MPSs) generated by quantum circuit evolution followed by projection onto MPSs with a fixed bond dimension $χ$. Specifically, we consider ensembles produced by: (i) random sequential unitary circuits, (ii) random brickwork unitary circuits, and (iii) circuits involving both unitaries and projective measurements. In all cases, we analyze the spectra of the MPS transfer matrices and relate them to the spreading of mutual information in the MPS state. We demonstrate how different features of the spectral density correspond to distinct types of circuits, revealing that these MPS ensembles retain crucial physical information about the underlying microscopic dynamics. Notably, in the presence of quantum monitoring, we show the existence of a measurement-induced entanglement transition (MIPT) in MPS ensembles, with the averaged dimension of the transfer matrix's null space serving as the effective order parameter.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2025

Stable Symmetry-Protected Topological Phases in Systems with Heralded Noise

We present a family of local quantum channels whose steady-states exhibit stable mixed-state symmetry-protected topological (SPT) order. Motivated by recent experimental progress on "erasure conversion" techniques that allow one to identify ($\textit{herald}$) decoherence processes, we consider open systems with biased erasure noise, which leads to strongly symmetric heralded errors. We utilize this heralding to construct a local correction protocol that effectively confines errors into short-ranged pairs in the steady-state. Using a combination of numerical simulations and mean-field analysis, we show that our protocol stabilizes SPT order against a sufficiently low rate of decoherence. As the rate of heralded noise increases, SPT order is eventually lost through a directed percolation transition. We further find that while introducing unheralded errors destroys SPT order in the limit of long length- and time-scales, the correction protocol is sufficient for ensuring that local SPT order persists, with a correlation length that diverges as $ξ\sim (1-f_e)^{-1/2}$, where $f_e$ is the fraction of errors that are heralded.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2024

Thermodynamic limitations on fault-tolerant quantum computing

We investigate the thermodynamic limits on scaling fault-tolerant quantum computers due to heating from quantum error correction (QEC). Quantum computers require error correction, which accounts for 99.9% of the qubit demand and generates heat through information-erasing processes. This heating increases the error rate, necessitating more rounds of error correction. We introduce a dynamical model that characterizes heat generation and dissipation for arrays of qubits weakly coupled to a refrigerator and identify a dynamical phase transition between two operational regimes: a bounded-error phase, where temperature stabilizes and error rates remain below fault-tolerance thresholds, and an unbounded-error phase, where rising temperatures drive error rates beyond sustainable levels, making fault tolerance infeasible. Applying our model to a superconducting qubit system performing Shor's algorithm to factor 2048-bit RSA integers, we find that current experimental parameters place the system in the bounded-error phase. Our results indicate that, while inherent heating can become significant, this thermodynamic constraint should not limit scalable fault tolerance if current hardware capabilities are maintained as systems scale.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2024

Directly observing replica symmetry breaking in a vector quantum-optical spin glass

Spin glasses are quintessential examples of complex matter. Although much about their order remains uncertain, abstract models of them inform, e.g., the classification of combinatorial optimization problems, the magnetic ordering in metals with impurities, and artificial intelligence -- where they form a mathematical basis for neural network computing and brain modeling. We demonstrate the ability of an active quantum gas microscope to realize a spin glass of a novel driven-dissipative and vector form. By microscopically visualizing its glassy spin states, the technique allows us to directly measure replica symmetry breaking and the resulting ultrametric hierarchical structure. Ultrametricity is known to be emergent in models of evolution, protein folding, climate change, and infinite-range equilibrium spin glasses; this work shows it to be directly observable in a physically realized system.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2024

Nonlocal growth of quantum conditional mutual information under decoherence

Local measurements cannot create entanglement, but they can convert short-range entanglement to long-range entanglement, as in quantum teleportation. This phenomenon of measurement-induced entanglement (MIE) has been widely discussed in recent work on measurement-induced entanglement phase transitions and related phenomena. Here, we situate MIE in a broader context of the growth of long-range conditional mutual information (CMI) under decoherence. We upper-bound the rate at which decoherence can generate long-range CMI, and derive a characterization of states that saturate this bound. We point out that the structure of states saturating the CMI upper bound can be very different under different decoherent dynamics and provide explicit examples. We additionally explore the dynamics of CMI in random quantum circuits subject to random local decoherence, as a function of circuit depth. We argue that the universality class of the finite-depth teleportation transition, as well as its lower critical dimension, are different for erasures than for measurements.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2024

Characterizing MPS and PEPS Preparable via Measurement and Feedback

Preparing long-range entangled states poses significant challenges for near-term quantum devices. It is known that measurement and feedback (MF) can aid this task by allowing the preparation of certain paradigmatic long-range entangled states with only constant circuit depth. Here we systematically explore the structure of states that can be prepared using constant-depth local circuits and a single MF round. Using the framework of tensor networks, the preparability under MF translates to tensor symmetries. We detail the structure of matrix-product states (MPS) and projected entangled-pair states (PEPS) that can be prepared using MF, revealing the coexistence of Clifford-like properties and magic. In one dimension, we show that states with abelian symmetry protected topological order are a restricted class of MF-preparable states. In two dimensions, we parameterize a subset of states with abelian topological order that are MF-preparable. Finally, we discuss the analogous implementation of operators via MF, providing a structural theorem that connects to the well-known Clifford teleportation.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2024

Measurement-induced phase transitions in systems with diffusive dynamics

The competition between scrambling and projective measurements can lead to measurement-induced entanglement phase transitions (MIPT). In this work, we show that the universality class of the MIPT is drastically altered when the system is coupled to a diffusing conserved density. Specifically, we consider a 1+1d random Clifford circuit locally monitored by classically diffusing particles (``measurers''). The resulting diffusive correlations in the measurement density are a relevant perturbation to the usual space-time random MIPT critical point, producing a new universality class for this phase transition. We find ``Griffiths-like'' effects due to rare space-time regions where, e.g., the diffusive measurers have a low or high density, but these are considerably weaker than the Griffiths effects that occur with quenched randomness that produce rare spatial regions with infinite lifetime.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2024

Spectral gaps of local quantum channels in the weak-dissipation limit

We consider the dynamics of generic chaotic quantum many-body systems with no conservation laws, subject to weak bulk dissipation. It was recently observed [T. Mori, arXiv:2311.10304] that the generator of these dissipative dynamics, a quantum channel $\mathcal{E}$, retains a nonzero gap as the dissipation strength $γ\to 0$ if the thermodynamic limit is taken first. We use a hydrodynamic description of operator spreading in the presence of dissipation to estimate the gap of $\mathcal{E}$ as $γ\to 0$; to calculate the operator-size distribution of the low-lying eigenmodes of $\mathcal{E}$; and to relate the gap to the long-time decay rates of autocorrelation functions under unitary dynamics. We provide a microscopic derivation of this hydrodynamic perspective for random unitary circuits. We argue that the gap in the $γ\to 0$ limit can change nonanalytically as one tunes the parameters of the unitary dynamics.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2024

Zero-temperature entanglement membranes in quantum circuits

In chaotic quantum systems, the entanglement of a region $A$ can be described in terms of the surface tension of a spacetime membrane pinned to the boundary of $A$. Here, we interpret the tension of this entanglement membrane in terms of the rate at which information "flows" across it. For any orientation of the membrane, one can define (generically nonunitary) dynamics across the membrane; we explore this dynamics in various space-time translation-invariant (STTI) stabilizer circuits in one and two spatial dimensions. We find that the flux of information across the membrane in these STTI circuits reaches a steady state. In the cases where this dynamics is nonunitary and the steady state flux is nonzero, this occurs because the dynamics across the membrane is unitary in a subspace of extensive entropy. This generalized unitarity is present in a broad class of STTI stabilizer circuits, and is also present in some special non-stabilizer models. The existence of multiple unitary (or generalized unitary) directions forces the entanglement membrane tension to be a piecewise linear function of the orientation of the membrane; in this respect, the entanglement membrane behaves like an interface in a zero-temperature classical lattice model. We argue that entanglement membranes in random stabilizer circuits that produce volume-law entanglement are also effectively at zero temperature.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2024

Absorbing state transitions with long-range annihilation

We introduce a family of classical stochastic processes describing diffusive particles undergoing branching and long-range annihilation in the presence of a parity constraint. The probability for a pair-annihilation event decays as a power-law in the distance between particles, with a tunable exponent. Such long-range processes arise naturally in various classical settings, such as chemical reactions involving reagents with long-range electromagnetic interactions. They also increasingly play a role in the study of quantum dynamics, in which certain quantum protocols can be mapped to classical stochastic processes with long-range interactions: for example, state preparation or error correction processes aim to prepare ordered ground states, which requires removing point-like excitations in pairs via non-local feedback operations conditioned on a global set of measurement outcomes. We analytically and numerically describe features of absorbing phases and phase transitions in this family of classical models as pairwise annihilation is performed at larger and larger distances. Notably, we find that the two canonical absorbing-state universality classes -- directed-percolation and parity-conserving -- are endpoints of a line of universality classes with continuously interpolating critical exponents.

cond-mat.stat-mech↗

arXiv2024

Eliminating Surface Oxides of Superconducting Circuits with Noble Metal Encapsulation

The lifetime of superconducting qubits is limited by dielectric loss, and a major source of dielectric loss is the native oxide present at the surface of the superconducting metal. Specifically, tantalum-based superconducting qubits have been demonstrated with record lifetimes, but a major source of loss is the presence of two-level systems (TLSs) in the surface tantalum oxide. Here, we demonstrate a strategy for avoiding oxide formation by encapsulating the tantalum with noble metals that do not form native oxide. By depositing a few nanometers of Au or AuPd alloy before breaking vacuum, we completely suppress tantalum oxide formation. Microwave loss measurements of superconducting resonators reveal that the noble metal is proximitized, with a superconducting gap over 80% of the bare tantalum at thicknesses where the oxide is fully suppressed. We find that losses in resonators fabricated by subtractive etching are dominated by oxides on the sidewalls, suggesting total surface encapsulation by additive fabrication as a promising strategy for eliminating surface oxide TLS loss in superconducting qubits.

cond-mat.supr-con↗

arXiv2024

Ballistic Modes as a Source of Anomalous Charge Noise

Steady-state currents generically occur both in systems with continuous translation invariance and in nonequilibrium settings with particle drift. In either case, thermal fluctuations advected by the current act as a source of noise for slower hydrodynamic modes. This noise is unconventional, since it is highly correlated along spacetime rays. We argue that, in quasi-one-dimensional geometries, the correlated noise from ballistic modes generically gives rise to anomalous full counting statistics (FCS) for diffusively spreading charges. We present numerical evidence for anomalous FCS in two settings: (1) a two-component continuum fluid, and (2) the totally asymmetric exclusion process (TASEP) initialized in a nonequilibrium state.

cond-mat.stat-mech↗