# Sense, sensibility, and superconductors

Jonathan Monroe disagreed with his PhD supervisor—with respect. They needed to measure a superconducting qubit, a tiny circuit in which current can flow forever. The qubit emits light, which carries information about the qubit’s state. Jonathan and Kater intensify the light using an amplifier. They’d fabricated many amplifiers, but none had worked. Jonathan suggested changing their strategy—with a politeness to which Emily Post couldn’t have objected. Jonathan’s supervisor, Kater Murch, suggested repeating the protocol they’d performed many times.

“That’s the definition of insanity,” Kater admitted, “but I think experiment needs to involve some of that.”

I watched the exchange via Skype, with more interest than I’d have watched the Oscars with. Someday, I hope, I’ll be able to weigh in on such a debate, despite working as a theorist. Someday, I’ll have partnered with enough experimentalists to develop insight.

I’m partnering with Jonathan and Kater on an experiment that coauthors and I proposed in a paper blogged about here. The experiment centers on an uncertainty relation, an inequality of the sort immortalized by Werner Heisenberg in 1927. Uncertainty relations imply that, if you measure a quantum particle’s position, the particle’s momentum ceases to have a well-defined value. If you measure the momentum, the particle ceases to have a well-defined position. Our uncertainty relation involves weak measurements. Weakly measuring a particle’s position doesn’t disturb the momentum much and vice versa. We can interpret the uncertainty in information-processing terms, because we cast the inequality in terms of entropies. Entropies, described here, are functions that quantify how efficiently we can process information, such as by compressing data. Jonathan and Kater are checking our inequality, and exploring its implications, with a superconducting qubit.

I had too little experience to side with Jonathan or with Kater. So I watched, and I contemplated how their opinions would sound if expressed about theory. Do I try one strategy again and again, hoping to change my results without changing my approach?

At the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics, Masters students had to swallow half-a-year of course material in weeks. I questioned whether I’d ever understand some of the material. But some of that material resurfaced during my PhD. Again, I attended lectures about Einstein’s theory of general relativity. Again, I worked problems about observers in free-fall. Again, I calculated covariant derivatives. The material sank in. I decided never to question, again, whether I could understand a concept. I might not understand a concept today, or tomorrow, or next week. But if I dedicate enough time and effort, I chose to believe, I’ll learn.

My decision rested on experience and on classes, taught by educational psychologists, that I’d taken in college. I’d studied how brains change during learning and how breaks enhance the changes. Sense, I thought, underlay my decision—though expecting outcomes to change, while strategies remain static, sounds insane.

Does sense underlie Kater’s suggestion, likened to insanity, to keep fabricating amplifiers as before? He’s expressed cynicism many times during our collaboration: Experiment needs to involve some insanity. The experiment probably won’t work for a long time. Plenty more things will likely break.

Jonathan and I agree with him. Experiments have a reputation for breaking, and Kater has a reputation for knowing experiments. Yet Jonathan—with professionalism and politeness—remains optimistic that other methods will prevail, that we’ll meet our goals early. I hope that Jonathan remains optimistic, and I fancy that Kater hopes, too. He prophesies gloom with a quarter of a smile, and his record speaks against him: A few months ago, I met a theorist who’d collaborated with Kater years before. The theorist marveled at the speed with which Kater had operated. A theorist would propose an experiment, and boom—the proposal would work.

Perhaps luck smiled upon the implementation. But luck dovetails with the sense that underlies Kater’s opinion: Experiments involve factors that you can’t control. Implement a protocol once, and it might fail because the temperature has risen too high. Implement the protocol again, and it might fail because a truck drove by your building, vibrating the tabletop. Implement the protocol again, and it might fail because you bumped into a knob. Implement the protocol a fourth time, and it might succeed. If you repeat a protocol many times, your environment might change, changing your results.

Sense underlies also Jonathan’s objections to Kater’s opinions. We boost our chances of succeeding if we keep trying. We derive energy to keep trying from creativity and optimism. So rebelling against our PhD supervisors’ sense is sensible. I wondered, watching the Skype conversation, whether Kater the student had objected to prophesies of doom as Jonathan did. Kater exudes the soberness of a tenured professor but the irreverence of a Californian who wears his hair slightly long and who tattooed his wedding band on. Science thrives on the soberness and the irreverence.

Who won Jonathan and Kater’s argument? Both, I think. Last week, they reported having fabricated amplifiers that work. The lab followed a protocol similar to their old one, but with more conscientiousness.

I’m looking forward to watching who wins the debate about how long the rest of the experiment takes. Either way, check out Jonathan’s talk about our experiment if you attend the American Physical Society’s March Meeting. Jonathan will speak on Thursday, March 5, at 12:03, in room 106. Also, keep an eye out for our paper—which will debut once Jonathan coaxes the amplifier into synching with his qubit.

# On the merits of flatworm reproduction

On my right sat a quantum engineer. She was facing a melanoma specialist who works at a medical school. Leftward of us sat a networks expert, a flatworm enthusiast, and a condensed-matter theorist.

Farther down sat a woman who slices up mouse brains.

Welcome to “Coherent Spins in Biology,” a conference that took place at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) this past December. Two southern Californians organized the workshop: Clarice Aiello heads UCLA’s Quantum Biology Tech lab. Thorsten Ritz, of the University of California, Irvine, cofounded a branch of quantum biology.

Quantum biology served as the conference’s backdrop. According to conventional wisdom, quantum phenomena can’t influence biology significantly: Biological systems have high temperatures, many particles, and fluids. Quantum phenomena, such as entanglement (a relationship that quantum particles can share), die quickly under such conditions.

Yet perhaps some survive. Quantum biologists search for biological systems that might use quantum resources. Then, they model and measure the uses and resources. Three settings (at least) have held out promise during the past few decades: avian navigation, photosynthesis, and olfaction. You can read about them in this book, cowritten by a conference participant for the general public. I’ll give you a taste (or a possibly quantum smell?) by sketching the avian-navigation proposal, developed by Thorsten and colleagues.

Birds migrate southward during the autumn and northward during the spring. How do they know where to fly? At least partially by sensing the Earth’s magnetic field, which leads compass needles to point northward. How do birds sense the field?

Possibly with a protein called “cryptochrome.” A photon (a particle of light) could knock an electron out of part of the protein and into another part. Each part would have one electron that lacked a partner. The electrons would share entanglement. One electron would interact with the Earth’s magnetic field differently than its partner, because its surroundings would differ. (Experts: The electrons would form a radical pair. One electron would neighbor different atoms than the other, so the electron would experience a different local magnetic field. The discrepancy would change the relative phase between the electrons’ spins.) The discrepancy could affect the rate at which the chemical system could undergo certain reactions. Which reactions occur could snowball into large and larger effects, eventually signaling the brain about where the bird should fly.

Quantum mechanics and life rank amongst the universe’s mysteries. How could a young researcher resist the combination? A postdoc warned me away, one lunchtime at the start of my PhD. Quantum biology had enjoyed attention several years earlier, he said, but noise the obscured experimental data. Controversy marred the field.

I ate lunch with that postdoc in 2013. Interest in quantum biology is reviving, as evidenced in the conference. Two reasons suggested themselves: new technologies and new research avenues. For example, Thorsten described the disabling and deletion of genes that code for cryptochrome. Such studies require years’ more work but might illuminate whether cryptochrome affects navigation.

The keynote speaker, Harvard’s Misha Lukin, illustrated new technologies and new research avenues. Misha’s lab has diamonds that contain quantum defects, which serve as artificial atoms. The defects sense tiny magnetic fields and temperatures. Misha’s group applies these quantum sensors to biology problems.

For example, different cells in an embryo divide at different times. Imagine reversing the order in which the cells divide. Would the reversal harm the organism? You could find out by manipulating the temperatures in different parts of the embryo: Temperature controls the rate at which cells divide.

Misha’s team injected nanoscale diamonds into a worm embryo. (See this paper for a related study.) The diamonds reported the temperature at various points in the worm. This information guided experimentalists who heated the embryo with lasers.

The manipulated embryos grew into fairly normal adults. But their cells, and their descendants’ cells, cycled through the stages of life slowly. This study exemplified, to me, one of the most meaningful opportunities for quantum physicists interested in biology: to develop technologies and analyses that can answer biology questions.

I mentioned, in an earlier blog post, another avenue emerging in quantum biology: Physicist Matthew Fisher proposed a mechanism by which entanglement might enhance coordinated neuron firing. My collaborator Elizabeth Crosson and I analyzed how the molecules in Matthew’s proposal—Posner clusters—could process quantum information. The field of Posner quantum biology had a population of about two, when Elizabeth and I entered, and I wondered whether anyone would join us.

The conference helped resolve my uncertainty. Three speakers (including me) presented work based on Matthew’s; two other participants were tilling the Posner soil; and another speaker mentioned Matthew’s proposal. The other two Posner talks related data from three experiments. The experimentalists haven’t finished their papers, so I won’t share details. But stay tuned.

Posner molecule (image by Swift et al.)

Clarice and Thorsten’s conference reminded me of a conference I’d participated in at the end of my PhD: Last month, I moonlighted as a quantum biologist. In 2017, I moonlighted as a quantum-gravity theorist. Two years earlier, I’d been dreaming about black holes and space-time. At UCLA, I was finishing the first paper I’ve coauthored with biophysicists. What a toolkit quantum information theory and thermodynamics provide, that it can unite such disparate fields.

The contrast—on top of what I learned at UCLA—filled my mind for weeks. And reminded me of the description of asexual reproduction that we heard from the conference’s flatworm enthusiast. According to Western Michigan University’s Wendy Beane, a flatworm “glues its butt down, pops its head off, and grows a new one. Y’know. As one does.”

I hope I never flinch from popping my head off and growing a new one—on my quantum-information-thermodynamics spine—whenever new science calls for figuring out.

With thanks to Clarice, Thorsten, and UCLA for their invitation and hospitality.

# An equation fit for a novel

Archana Kamal was hunting for an apartment in Cambridge, Massachusetts. She was moving MIT, to work as a postdoc in physics. The first apartment she toured had housed John Updike, during his undergraduate career at Harvard. No other apartment could compete; Archana signed the lease.

The apartment occupied the basement of a red-brick building covered in vines. The rooms spanned no more than 350 square feet. Yet her window opened onto the neighbors’ garden, whose leaves she tracked across the seasons. And Archana cohabited with history.

She’s now studying the universe’s history, as an assistant professor of physics at the University of Massachusetts Lowell. The cosmic microwave background (CMB) pervades the universe. The CMB consists of electromagnetic radiation, or light. Light has particle-like properties and wavelike properties. The wavelike properties include wavelength, the distance between successive peaks. Long-wavelength light includes red light, infrared light, and radio waves. Short-wavelength light includes blue light, ultraviolet light, and X-rays. Light of one wavelength and light of another wavelength are said to belong to different modes.

Does the CMB have nonclassical properties, impossible to predict with classical physics but (perhaps) predictable with quantum theory? The CMB does according to the theory of inflation. According to the theory, during a short time interval after the Big Bang, the universe expanded very quickly: Spacetime stretched. Inflation explains features of our universe, though we don’t know what mechanism would have effected the expansion.

According to inflation, around the Big Bang time, all the light in the universe crowded together. The photons (particles of light) interacted, entangling (developing strong quantum correlations). Spacetime then expanded, and the photons separated. But they might retain entanglement.

Detecting that putative entanglement poses challenges. For instance, the particles that you’d need to measure could produce a signal too weak to observe. Cosmologists have been scratching their heads about how to observe nonclassicality in the CMB. One team—Nishant Agarwal at UMass Lowell and Sarah Shandera at Pennsylvania State University—turned to Archana for help.

Archana studies the theory of open quantum systems, quantum systems that interact with their environments. She thinks most about systems such as superconducting qubits, tiny circuits with which labs are building quantum computers. But the visible universe constitutes an open quantum system.

We can see only part of the universe—or, rather, only part of what we believe is the whole universe. Why? We can see only stuff that’s emitted light that has reached us, and light has had only so long to travel. But the visible universe interacts (we believe) with stuff we haven’t seen. For instance, according to the theory of inflation, that rapid expansion stretched some light modes’ wavelengths. Those wavelengths grew longer than the visible universe. We can’t see those modes’ peak-to-peak variations or otherwise observe the modes, often called “frozen.” But the frozen modes act as an environment that exchanges information and energy with the visible universe.

We describe an open quantum system’s evolution with a quantum master equation, which I blogged about four-and-a-half years ago. Archana and collaborators constructed a quantum master equation for the visible universe. The frozen modes, they found, retain memories of the visible universe. (Experts: the bath is non-Markovian.) Next, they need to solve the equation. Then, they’ll try to use their solution to identify quantum observables that could reveal nonclassicality in the CMB.

Frozen modes

Archana’s project caught my fancy for two reasons. First, when I visited her in October, I was collaborating on a related project. My coauthors and I were concocting a scheme for detecting nonclassical correlations in many-particle systems by measuring large-scale properties. Our paper debuted last month. It might—with thought and a dash of craziness—be applied to detect nonclassicality in the CMB. Archana’s explanation improved my understanding of our scheme’s potential.

Second, Archana and collaborators formulated a quantum master equation for the visible universe. A quantum master equation for the visible universe. The phrase sounded romantic to me.1 It merited a coauthor who’d seized on an apartment lived in by a Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist.

Archana’s cosmology and Updike stories reminded me of one reason why I appreciate living in the Boston area: History envelops us here. Last month, while walking to a grocery, I found a sign that marks the building in which the poet e. e. cummings was born. My walking partner then generously tolerated a recitation of cummings’s “anyone lived in a pretty how town.” History enriches our lives—and some of it might contain entanglement.

1It might sound like gobbledygook to you, if I’ve botched my explanations of the terminology.

With thanks to Archana and the UMass Lowell Department of Physics and Applied Physics for their hospitality and seminar invitation.

# The paper that begged for a theme song

A year ago, the “I’m a little teapot” song kept playing in my head.

I was finishing a collaboration with David Limmer, a theoretical chemist at the University of California Berkeley. David studies quantum and classical systems far from equilibrium, including how these systems exchange energy and information with their environments. Example systems include photoisomers.

A photoisomer is a molecular switch. These switches appear across nature and technologies. We have photoisomers in our eyes, and experimentalists have used photoisomers to boost solar-fuel storage. A photoisomer has two functional groups, or collections of bonded atoms, attached to a central axis.

Your average-Joe photoisomer spends much of its life in equilibrium, exchanging heat with room-temperature surroundings. The molecule has the shape above, called the cis configuration. Imagine shining a laser or sunlight on the photoisomer. The molecule can absorb a photon, or particle of light, gaining energy. The energized switch has the opportunity to switch: One chemical group can rotate downward. The molecule will occupy its trans configuration.

The molecule now has more energy than it had while equilibrium, albeit less energy than it had right after absorbing the photon. The molecule can remain in this condition for a decent amount of time. (Experts: The molecule occupies a metastable state.) That is, the molecule can store sunlight. For that reason, experimentalists at Harvard and MIT attached photoisomers to graphene nanotubules, improving the nanotubules’ storage of solar fuel.

With what probability does a photoisomer switch upon absorbing a photon? This question has resisted easy answering, because photoisomers prove difficult to model: They’re small, quantum, and far from equilibrium. People have progressed by making assumptions, but such assumptions can lack justifications or violate physical principles. David wanted to derive a simple, general bound—of the sort in which thermodynamicists specialize—on a photoisomer’s switching probability.

He had a hunch as to how he could derive such a bound. I’ve blogged, many times, about thermodynamic resource theories. Thermodynamic resource theories are simple models, developed in quantum information theory, for exchanges of heat, particles, information, and more. These models involve few assumptions: the conservation of energy, quantum theory, and, to some extent, the existence of a large environment (Markovianity). With such a model, David suspected, he might derive his bound.

I knew nothing about photoisomers when I met David, but I knew about thermodynamic resource theories. I’d contributed to their development, to the theorems that have piled up in the resource-theory corner of quantum information theory. Then, the corner had given me claustrophobia. Those theorems felt so formal, abstract, and idealized. Formal, abstract theory has drawn me ever since I started studying physics in college. But did resource theories model physical reality? Could they impact science beyond our corner of quantum information theory? Did resource theories matter?

I called for connecting thermodynamic resource theories to physical reality four years ago, in a paper that begins with an embarrassing story about me. Resource theorists began designing experiments whose results should agree with our theorems. Theorists also tried to improve the accuracy with which resource theories model experimentalists’ limitations. See David’s and my paper for a list of these achievements. They delighted me, as a step toward the broadening of resource theories’ usefulness.

Like any first step, this step pointed toward opportunities. Experiments designed to test our theorems essentially test quantum mechanics. Scientists have tested quantum mechanics for decades; we needn’t test it much more. Such experimental proposals can push experimentalists to hone their abilities, but I hoped that the community could accomplish more. We should be able to apply resource theories to answer questions cultivated in other fields, such as condensed matter and chemistry. We should be useful to scientists outside our corner of quantum information.

David’s idea lit me up like photons on a solar-fuel-storage device. He taught me about photoisomers, I taught him about resource theories, and we derived his bound. Our proof relies on the “second laws of thermodynamics.” These abstract resource-theory results generalize the second law of thermodynamics, which helps us understand why time flows in only one direction. We checked our bound against numerical simulations (experts: of Lindbladian evolution). Our bound is fairly tight if the photoisomer has a low probability of absorbing a photon, as in the Harvard-MIT experiment.

Experts: We also quantified the photoisomer’s coherences relative to the energy eigenbasis. Coherences can’t boost the switching probability, we concluded. But, en route to this conclusion, we found that the molecule is a natural realization of a quantum clock. Our quantum-clock modeling extends to general dissipative Landau-Zener transitions, prevalent across condensed matter and chemistry.

As I worked on our paper one day, a jingle unfolded in my head. I recognized the tune first: “I’m a little teapot.” I hadn’t sung that much since kindergarten, I realized. Lyrics suggested themselves:

I’m a little isomer
with two hands.
Here is my cis pose;
here is my trans.

Stand me in the sunlight;
watch me spin.
I’ll keep solar
energy in!

The song lodged itself in my head for weeks. But if you have to pay an earworm to collaborate with David, do.

# Quantum Error Correction with Molecules

In the previous blog post (titled, “On the Coattails of Quantum Supremacy“) we started with Google and ended up with molecules! I also mentioned a recent paper by John Preskill, Jake Covey, and myself (see also this videoed talk) where we assume that, somewhere in the (near?) future, experimentalists will be able to construct quantum superpositions of several orientations of molecules or other rigid bodies. Next, I’d like to cover a few more details on how to construct error-correcting codes for anything from classical bits in your phone to those future quantum computers, molecular or otherwise.

# Classical error correction: the basics

Error correction is concerned with the design of an encoding that allows for protection against noise. Let’s say we want to protect one classical bit, which is in either “0” or “1”. If the bit is say in “0”, and the environment (say, the strong magnetic field from a magnet you forgot was laying next to your hard drive) flipped it to “1” without our knowledge, an error would result (e.g., making your phone think you swiped right!)

Now let’s encode our single logical bit into three physical bits, whose $2^3=8$ possible states are represented by the eight corners of the cube below. Let’s encode the logical bit as “0” —> 000 and “1” —> 111, corresponding to the corners of the cube marked by the black and white ball, respectively. For our (local) noise model, we assume that flips of only one of the three physical bits are more likely to occur than flips of two or three at the same time.

Error correction is, like many Hollywood movies, an origin story. If, say, the first bit flips in our above code, the 000 state is mapped to 100, and 111 is mapped to 011. Since we have assumed that the most likely error is a flip of one of the bits, we know upon observing that 100 must have come from the clean 000, and 011 from 111. Thus, in either case of the logical bit being “0” or “1”, we can recover the information by simply observing which state the majority of the bits are in. The same things happen when the second or third bits flip. In all three cases, the logical “0” state is mapped to one of its three neighboring points (above, in blue) while the logical “1” is mapped to its own three points, which, crucially, are distinct from the neighbors of “0”. The set of points $\{000,100,010,001\}$ that are closer to 000 than to 111 is called a Voronoi tile.

Now, let’s adapt these ideas to molecules. Consider the rotational states of a dumb-bell molecule consisting of two different atoms. (Let’s assume that we have frozen this molecule to the point that the vibration of the inter-atomic bond is limited, essentially creating a fixed distance between the two atoms.) This molecule can orient itself in any direction, and each such orientation can be represented as a point $\mathbf{v}$ on the surface of a sphere. Now let us encode a classical bit using the north and south poles of this sphere (represented in the picture below as a black and a white ball, respectively). The north pole of the sphere corresponds to the molecule being parallel to the z-axis, while the south pole corresponds to the molecule being anti-parallel.

This time, the noise consists of small shifts in the molecule’s orientation. Clearly, if such shifts are small, the molecule just wiggles a bit around the z-axis. Such wiggles still allow us to infer that the molecule is (mostly) parallel and anti-parallel to the axis, as long as they do not rotate the molecule all the way past the equator. Upon such correctable rotations, the logical “0” state — the north pole — is mapped to a point in the northern hemisphere, while logical “1” — the south pole — is mapped to a point in the southern hemisphere. The northern hemisphere forms a Voronoi tile of the logical “0” state (blue in the picture), which, along with the corresponding tile of the logical “1” state (the southern hemisphere), tiles the entire sphere.

Quantum error correction

To upgrade these ideas to the quantum realm, recall that this time we have to protect superpositions. This means that, in addition to shifting our quantum logical state to other states as before, noise can also affect the terms in the superposition itself. Namely, if, say, the superposition is equal — with an amplitude of $+1/\sqrt{2}$ in “0” and $+1/\sqrt{2}$ in “1” — noise can change the relative sign of the superposition and map one of the amplitudes to $-1/\sqrt{2}$. We didn’t have to worry about such sign errors before, because our classical information would always be the definite state of “0” or “1”. Now, there are two effects of noise to worry about, so our task has become twice as hard!

Not to worry though. In order to protect against both sources of noise, all we need to do is effectively stagger the above constructions. Now we will need to design a logical “0” state which is itself a superposition of different points, with each point separated from all of the points that are superimposed to make the logical “1” state.

Diatomic molecules: For the diatomic molecule example, consider superpositions of all four corners of two antipodal tetrahedra for the two respective logical states.

The logical “0” state for the quantum code is now itself a quantum superposition of orientations of our diatomic molecule corresponding to the four black points on the sphere to the left (the sphere to the right is a top-down view). Similarly, the logical “1” quantum state is a superposition of all orientations corresponding to the white points.

Each orientation (black or white point) present in our logical states rotates under fluctuations in the position of the molecule. However, the entire set of orientations for say logical “0” — the tetrahedron — rotates rigidly under such rotations. Therefore, the region from which we can successfully recover after rotations is fully determined by the Voronoi tile of any one of the corners of the tetrahedron. (Above, we plot the tile for the point at the north pole.) This cell is clearly smaller than the one for classical north-south-pole encoding we used before. However, the tetrahedral code now provides some protection against phase errors — the other type of noise that we need to worry about if we are to protect quantum information. This is an example of the trade-off we must make in order to protect against both types of noise; a licensed quantum mechanic has to live with such trade-offs every day.

Oscillators: Another example of a quantum encoding is the GKP encoding in the phase space of the harmonic oscillator. Here, we have at our disposal the entire two-dimensional plane indexing different values of position and momentum. In this case, we can use a checkerboard approach, superimposing all points at the centers of the black squares for the logical “0” state, and similarly all points at the centers of the white squares for the logical “1”. The region depicting correctable momentum and position shifts is then the Voronoi cell of the point at the origin: if a shift takes our central black point to somewhere inside the blue square, we know (most likely) where that point came from! In solid state circles, the blue square is none other than the primitive or unit cell of the lattice consisting of points making up both of the logical states.

Asymmetric molecules (a.k.a. rigid rotors): Now let’s briefly return to molecules. Above, we considered diatomic molecules that had a symmetry axis, i.e., that were left unchanged under rotations about the axis that connects the two atoms. There are of course more general molecules out there, including ones that are completely asymmetric under any possible (proper) 3D rotation (see figure below for an example).

BONUS: There is a subtle mistake relating to the geometry of the rotation group in the labeling of this figure. Let me know if you can find it in the comments!

All of the orientations of the asymmetric molecule, and more generally a rigid body, can no longer be parameterized by the sphere. They can be parameterized by the 3D rotation group $\mathsf{SO}(3)$: each orientation of an asymmetric molecule is labeled by the 3D rotation necessary to obtain said orientation from a reference state. Such rotations, and in turn the orientations themselves, are parameterized by an axis $\mathbf{v}$ (around which to rotate) and an angle $\omega$ (by which one rotates). The rotation group $\mathsf{SO}(3)$ luckily can still be viewed by humans on a sheet of paper. Namely, $\mathsf{SO}(3)$ can be thought of as a ball of radius $\pi$ with opposite points identified. The direction of each vector $\omega\mathbf{v}$ lying inside the ball corresponds to the axis of rotation, while the length corresponds to the angle. This may take some time to digest, but it’s not crucial to the story.

So far we’ve looked at codes defined on cubes of bits, spheres, and phase-space lattices. Turns out that even $\mathsf{SO}(3)$ can house similar encodings! In other words, $\mathsf{SO}(3)$ can also be cut up into different Voronoi tiles, which in turn can be staggered to create logical “0” and “1” states consisting of different molecular orientations. There are many ways to pick such states, corresponding to various subgroups of $\mathsf{SO}(3)$. Below, we sketch two sets of black/white points, along with the Voronoi tile corresponding to the rotations that are corrected by each encoding.

Voronoi tiles of the black point at the center of the ball representing the 3D rotation group, for two different molecular codes. This and the Voronoi cells corresponding to the other points tile together to make up the entire ball. 3D printing all of these tiles would make for cool puzzles!

In closing…

Achieving supremacy was a big first step towards making quantum computing a practical and universal tool. However, the largest obstacles still await, namely handling superposition-poisoning noise coming from the ever-curious environment. As quantum technologies advance, other possible routes for error correction are by encoding qubits in harmonic oscillators and molecules, alongside the “traditional” approach of using arrays of physical qubits. Oscillator and molecular qubits possess their own mechanisms for error correction, and could prove useful (granted that the large high-energy space required for the procedures to work can be accessed and controlled). Even though molecular qubits are not yet mature enough to be used in quantum computers, we have at least outlined a blueprint for how some of the required pieces can be built. We are by no means done however: besides an engineering barrier, we need to further develop how to run robust computations on these exotic spaces.

Author’s note: I’d like to acknowledge Jose Gonzalez for helping me immensely with the writing of this post, as well as for drawing the comic panels in the previous post. The figures above were made possible by Mathematica 12.

# On the Coattails of Quantum Supremacy

Most readers have by now heard that Google has “achieved” quantum “supremacy”. Notice the only word not in quotes is “quantum”, because unlike previous proposals that have also made some waves, quantumness is mostly not under review here. (Well, neither really are the other two words, but that story has already been covered quite eloquently by John, Scott, and Toby.) The Google team has managed to engineer a device that, although noisy, can do the right thing a large-enough fraction of the time for people to be able to “quantify its quantumness”.

However, the Google device, while less so than previous incarnations, is still noisy. Future devices like it will continue to be noisy. Noise is what makes quantum computers so darn difficult to build; it is what destroys the fragile quantum superpositions that we are trying so hard to protect (remember, unlike a classical computer, we are not protecting things we actually observe, but their superposition).

Protecting quantum information is like taking your home-schooled date (who has lived their entire life in a bunker) to the prom for the first time. It is a fun and necessary part of a healthy relationship to spend time in public, but the price you pay is the possibility that your date will hit it off with someone else. This will leave you abandoned, dancing alone to Taylor Swift’s “You Belong With Me” while crying into your (spiked?) punch.

The high school sweetheart/would-be dance partner in the above provocative example is the quantum superposition — the resource we need for a working quantum computer. You want it all to yourself, but your adversary — the environment — wants it too. No matter how much you try to protect it, you’ll have to observe it eventually (after all, you want to know the answer to your computation). And when you do (take your date out onto the crowded dance floor), you run the risk of the environment collapsing the information before you do, leaving you with nothing.

Protecting quantum information is also like (modern!) medicine. The fussy patient is the quantum information, stored in delicate superposition, while quantumists are the doctors aiming to prevent the patient from getting sick (or “corrupted”). If our patient incurs say “quasiparticle poisoning”, we first diagnose the patient’s syndromes, and, based on this diagnosis, apply procedures like “lattice surgery” and “state injection” to help our patient successfully recover.

Error correction with qubits

Error correction sounds hard, and it should! Not to fear: plenty of very smart people have thought hard about this problem, and have come up with a plan — to redundantly encode the quantum superposition in a way that allows protection from errors caused by noise. Such quantum error-correction is an expansion of the techniques we currently use to protect classical bits in your phone and computer, but now the aim is to protect, not the definitive bit states 0 or 1, but their quantum superpositions. Things are even harder now, as the protection machinery has to do its magic without disturbing the superposition itself (after all, we want our quantum calculation to run to its conclusion and hack your bank).

For example, consider a qubit — the fundamental quantum unit represented by two shelves (which, e.g., could be the ground and excited states of an atom, the absence or presence of a photon in a box, or the zeroth and first quanta of a really cold LC circuit). This qubit can be in any quantum superposition of the two shelves, described by 2 probability amplitudes, one corresponding to each shelf. Observing this qubit will collapse its state onto either one of the shelves, changing the values of the 2 amplitudes. Since the resource we use for our computation is precisely this superposition, we definitely do not want to observe this qubit during our computation. However, we are not the only ones looking: the environment (other people at the prom: the trapping potential of our atom, the jiggling atoms of our metal box, nearby circuit elements) is also observing this system, thereby potentially manipulating the stored quantum state without our knowledge and ruining our computation.

Now consider 50 such qubits. Such a space allows for a superposition with $2^{50}$ different amplitudes (instead of just $2^1$ for the case of a single qubit). We are once again plagued by noise coming from the environment. But what if we now, less ambitiously, want to store only one qubit’s worth of information in this 50-qubit system? Now there is room to play with! A clever choice of how to do this (a.k.a. the encoding) helps protect from the bad environment.

The entire prospect of building a bona-fide quantum computer rests on this extra overhead or quantum redundancy of using a larger system to encode a smaller one. It sounds daunting at first: if we need 50 physical qubits for each robust logical qubit, then we’d need “I-love-you-3000” physical qubits for 60 logical ones? Yes, this is a fact we all have to live with. But granted we can scale up our devices to that many qubits, there is no fundamental obstacle that prevents us from then using error correction to make next-level computers.

To what extent do we need to protect our quantum superposition from the environment? It would be too ambitious to protect it from a meteor shower. Or a power outage (although that would be quite useful here in California). So what then can we protect against?

Our working answer is local noise — noise that affects only a few qubits that are located near each other in the device. We can never be truly certain if this type of noise is all that our quantum computers will encounter. However, our belief that this is the noise we should focus on is grounded in solid physical principles — that nature respects locality, that affecting things far away from you is harder than making an impact nearby. (So far Google has not reported otherwise, although much more work needs to be done to verify this intuition.)

The harmonic oscillator

In what other ways can we embed our two-shelf qubit into a larger space? Instead of scaling up using many physical qubits, we can utilize a fact that we have so far swept under the rug: in any physical system, our two shelves are already part of an entire bookcase! Atoms have more than one excited state, there can be more than one photon in a box, and there can be more than one quantum in a cold LC circuit. Why don’t we use some of that higher-energy space for our redundant encoding?

The noise in our bookcase will certainly be different, since the structure of the space, and therefore the notion of locality, is different. How to cope with this? The good news is that such a space — the space of the harmonic oscillator — also has a(t least one) natural notion of locality!

Whatever the incarnation, the oscillator has associated with it a position and momentum (different jargon for these quantities may be used, depending on the context, but you can just think of a child on a swing, just quantized). Anyone who knows the joke about Heisenberg getting pulled over, will know that these two quantities cannot be set simultaneously.

Nevertheless, local errors can be thought of as small shifts in position or momentum, while nonlocal errors are ones that suddenly shift our bewildered swinging quantized child from one side of the swing to the other.

Armed with a local noise model, we can extend our know-how from multi-qubit land to the oscillator. One of the first such oscillator codes were developed by Gottesman, Kitaev, and Preskill (GKP). Proposed in 2001, GKP encodings posed a difficult engineering challenge: some believed that GKP states could never be realized, that they “did not exist”. In the past few years however, GKP states have been realized nearly simultaneously in two experimental platforms. (Food for thought for the non-believers!)

Parallel to GKP codes, another promising oscillator encoding using cat states is also being developed. This encoding has historically been far easier to create experimentally. It is so far the only experimental procedure achieving the break-even point, at which the actively protected logical information has the same lifetime as the system’s best unprotected degree of freedom.

Can we mix and match all of these different systems? Why yes! While Google is currently trying to build the surface code out of qubits, using oscillators (instead of qubits) for the surface code and encoding said oscillators either in GKP (see related IBM post) [1,2,3] or cat [4,5] codes is something people are seriously considering. There is even more overhead, but the extra information one gets from the correction procedure might make for a more fault-tolerant machine. With all of these different options being explored, it’s an exciting time to be into quantum!

Molecules?

It turns out there are still other systems we can consider, although because they are sufficiently more “out there” at the moment, I should first say “bear with me!” as I explain. Forget about atoms, photons in a box, and really cold LC circuits. Instead, consider a rigid 3-dimensional object whose center of mass has been pinned in such a way that the object can rotate any way it wants. Now, “quantize” it! In other words, consider the possibility of having quantum superpositions of different orientations of this object. Just like superpositions of a dead and alive cat, of a photon and no photon, the object can be in quantum superposition of oriented up, sideways, and down, for example. Superpositions of all possible orientations then make up our new configuration space (read: playground), and we are lucky that it too inherits many of the properties we know and love from its multi-qubit and oscillator cousins.

Examples of rigid bodies include airplanes (which can roll, pitch and yaw, even while “fixed” on a particular trajectory vector) and robot arms (which can rotate about multiple joints). Given that we’re not quantizing those (yet?), what rigid body should we have in mind as a serious candidate? Well, in parallel to the impressive engineering successes of the multi-qubit and oscillator paradigms, physicists and chemists have made substantial progress in trapping and cooling molecules. If a trapped molecule is cold enough, it’s vibrational and electronic states can be neglected, and its rotational states form exactly the rigid body we are interested in. Such rotational states, as far as we can tell, are not in the realm of Avengers-style science fiction.

The idea to use molecules for quantum computing dates all the way back to a 2001 paper by Dave DeMille, but in a recent paper by Jacob Covey, John Preskill, and myself, we propose a framework of how to utilize the large space of molecular orientations to protect against (you guessed it!) a type of local noise. In the second part of the story, called “Quantum Error Correction with Molecules“, I will cover a particular concept that is not only useful for a proper error-correcting code (classical and quantum), but also one that is quite fun to try and understand. The concept is based on a certain kind of tiling, called Voronoi tiles or Thiessen polygons, which can be used to tile anything from your bathroom floor to the space of molecular orientations. Stay tuned!

# The quantum steampunker by Massachusetts Bay

Every spring, a portal opens between Waltham, Massachusetts and another universe.

The other universe has a Watch City dual to Waltham, known for its watch factories. The cities throw a festival to which explorers, inventors, and tourists flock. Top hats, goggles, leather vests, bustles, and lace-up boots dot the crowds. You can find pet octopodes, human-machine hybrids, and devices for bending space and time. Steam powers everything.

Watch City Steampunk Festival

So I learned thanks to Maxim Olshanyi, a professor of physics at the University of Massachusetts Boston. He hosted my colloquium, “Quantum steampunk: Quantum information meets thermodynamics,” earlier this month. Maxim, I discovered, has more steampunk experience than I. He digs up century-old designs for radios, builds the radios, and improves upon the designs. He exhibits his creations at the Watch City Steampunk Festival.

Maxim Olshanyi

I never would have guessed that Maxim moonlights with steampunkers. But his hobby makes sense: Maxim has transformed our understanding of quantum integrability.

Integrability is to thermalization as Watch City is to Waltham. A bowl of baked beans thermalizes when taken outside in Boston in October: Heat dissipates into the air. After half-an-hour, large-scale properties bear little imprint of their initial conditions: The beans could have begun at 112ºF or 99º or 120º. Either way, the beans have cooled.

Integrable systems avoid thermalizing; more of their late-time properties reflect early times. Why? We can understand through an example, an integrable system whose particles don’t interact with each other (whose particles are noninteracting fermions). The dynamics conserve the particles’ momenta. Consider growing the system by adding particles. The number of conserved quantities grows as the system size. The conserved quantities retain memories of the initial conditions.

Imagine preparing an integrable system, analogously to preparing a bowl of baked beans, and letting it sit for a long time. Will the system equilibrate, or settle down to, a state predictable with a simple rule? We might expect not. Obeying the same simple rule would cause different integrable systems to come to resemble each other. Integrable systems seem unlikely to homogenize, since each system retains much information about its initial conditions.

Maxim and collaborators exploded this expectation. Integrable systems do relax to simple equilibrium states, which the physicists called the generalized Gibbs ensemble (GGE). Josiah Willard Gibbs cofounded statistical mechanics during the 1800s. He predicted the state to which nonintegrable systems, like baked beans in autumnal Boston, equilibrate. Gibbs’s theory governs classical systems, like baked beans, as does the GGE theory. But also quantum systems equilibrate to the GGE, and Gibbs’s conclusions translate into quantum theory with few adjustments. So I’ll explain in quantum terms.

Consider quantum baked beans that exchange heat with a temperature-$T$ environment. Let $\hat{H}$ denote the system’s Hamiltonian, which basically represents the beans’ energy. The beans equilibrate to a quantum Gibbs state, $e^{ - \hat{H} / ( k_{\rm B} T ) } / Z$. The $k_{\rm B}$ denotes Boltzmann’s constant, a fundamental constant of nature. The partition function $Z$ enables the quantum state to obey probability theory (normalizes the state).

Maxim and friends modeled their generalized Gibbs ensemble on the Gibbs state. Let $\hat{I}_m$ denote a quantum integrable system’s $m^{\rm th}$ conserved quantity. This system equilibrates to $e^{ - \sum_m \lambda_m \hat{I}_m } / Z_{\rm GGE}$. The $Z_{\rm GGE}$ normalizes the state. The intensive parameters $\lambda_m$’s serve analogously to temperature and depend on the conserved quantities’ values. Maxim and friends predicted this state using information theory formalized by Ed Jaynes. Inventing the GGE, they unlocked a slew of predictions about integrable quantum systems.

A radio built by Maxim. According to him, “The invention was to replace a diode with a diode bridge, in a crystal radio, thus gaining a factor of two in the output power.”

I define quantum steampunk as the intersection of quantum theory, especially quantum information theory, with thermodynamics, and the application of this intersection across science. Maxim has used information theory to cofound a branch of quantum statistical mechanics. Little wonder that he exhibits homemade radios at the Watch City Steampunk Festival. He also holds a license to drive steam engines and used to have my postdoc position. I appreciate having older cousins to look up to. Here’s hoping that I become half the quantum steampunker that I found by Massachusetts Bay.

With thanks to Maxim and the rest of the University of Massachusetts Boston Department of Physics for their hospitality.

The next Watch City Steampunk Festival takes place on May 9, 2020. Contact me if you’d attend a quantum-steampunk meetup!