# Bas|ket>ball: A Game for Young Students Learning Quantum Computing

It is no secret that quantum computing has recently become one of the trendiest topics within the physics community, gaining financial support and good press at an ever increasing pace. The new technology not only promises huge advances in information processing, but it also – in theory – has the potential to crack the encryption that currently protects sensitive information inside governments and businesses around the world. Consequently, quantum research has extended beyond academic groups and has entered the technical industry, creating new job opportunities for both experimentalists and theorists. However, in order for this technology to become a reality, we need qualified engineers and scientists that can fill these positions.

Increasing the number of individuals with an interest in this field starts with educating our youth. While it does not take particularly advanced mathematics to explain the basics of quantum computing, there are still involved topics such as quantum superposition, unitary evolution, and projective measurement that can be difficult to conceptualize. In order to explain these topics at a middle and high school level to encourage more students to enter this area, we decided to design an educational game called Bas|ket>ball, which allows students to directly engage with quantum computing concepts outside of the classroom while being physically active.

After playing the game with students in our local Quantum Information High (QIHigh) Program at Stevens Institute of Technology, we realized that the game is a fun learning tool worth sharing with the broader physics community. Here, we describe a non-gender specific activity that can be used to effectively teach the basics of quantum computing at a high school level.

Quantum Basketball is something that helps you understand a very confusing topic, especially for a ninth grader! In the QI-High Program at Stevens, I was approached with a challenge of learning about quantum computing, and while I was hesitant at first, my mentors made the topic so much more understandable by relating it to a sport that I love!

Grace Conlin, Freshman Student from High Tech High School

## The Rules of Bas|ket>ball

The game can have up to 10 student players and only requires one basketball. Each player acts as a quantum bit (qubit) in a quantum register and is initialized to the |0> position. During each turn, a player will perform one of the allowed quantum gates depending on their position on the court. A diagram of the court positions is displayed at the bottom.

There are four options of quantum gates from which players can choose to move around the court:

1. X Gate – This single qubit gate will take a player from the |0> to the |1> position, and vice versa.
2. Hadamard Gate – This single qubit gate will take a player from the |0> to the (|0> + |1>) / $\sqrt{2}$ position and the |1> to the (|0> – |1>) / $\sqrt{2}$ position, and vice versa.
3. Control-Not Gate – This two-qubit gate allows one player to control another only if they are in the |1> position, or in superposition between |0> and |1>. The player in the |1> position can move a player back and forth between the |0> and |1> positions. The player in the superposition can choose to entangle with a player in the |0> position.
4. Z Measurement – The player takes a shot. The player measures a 1 if he/she makes the shot and measures a 0 if he/she misses. Once the player shoots, he/she has to return back to the |0> position no matter what was measured.

The first player to measure ten 1’s (make ten shots) wins! In order to make the game more interesting, the following additional rules are put in place:

1. Each player has one SWAP gate that can be utilized per game to switch positions with any other player, including players that are entangled. This is an effective way to replace yourself with someone in an entangled state.
2. Up to five players can be entangled at any given time. The only way to break the entanglement is to make a Z Measurement by taking a shot. If one of the entangled players makes a shot, each player entangled with that player receives a point value equal to the number of individuals they are entangled with (including themselves). If the player misses, the entanglement is broken and no points are awarded. Either way, all players go back to the |0> position.

## Example Bas|ket>ball Match

For example, let’s say that we have three student players. Each will start at the red marker, behind the basketball hoop. One by one, each student will choose from the list of gate operations above. If the first player chooses an X-gate, he/she will physically move to the blue marker and be in a better position to make a measurement (take a shot) during the next turn. If the second player chooses to perform a Hadamard gate, he/she will move to the green marker. Each of the students will continue to move around the court and score points by making measurements until 10 points are reached.

However, things can get more interesting when players start to form alliances by entangling. If player 1 is at the green marker and player 3 is at the red marker, then player 1 can perform a C-Not gate on player 3 to become entangled with them. Now if either player takes a shot and scores a point, both players will be awarded 2 points (1 x the number of players entangled).

We believe that simple games such as this, along with Quantum TiqTaqToe and Quantum Chess, will attract more young students to pursue degrees in physics and computer science, and eventually specialize in quantum information and computing fields. Not only is this important for the overall progression of the field, but also to encourage more diversity and inclusion in STEM.

# 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!

# Sultana: The Girl Who Refused To Stop Learning

Caltech attracts some truly unique individuals from all across the globe with a passion for figuring things out. But there was one young woman on campus this past summer whose journey towards scientific research was uniquely inspiring.

Sultana spent the summer at Caltech in the SURF program, working on next generation quantum error correction codes under the supervision of Dr. John Preskill. As she wrapped up her summer project, returning to her “normal” undergraduate education in Arizona, I had the honor of helping her document her remarkable journey. This is her story:

Afghanistan

My name is Sultana. I was born in Afghanistan. For years I was discouraged and outright prevented from going to school by the war. It was not safe for me because of the active war and violence in the region, even including suicide bombings. Society was still recovering from the decades long civil war, the persistent influence of a dethroned, theocratically regressive regime and the current non-functioning government. These forces combined to make for a very insecure environment for a woman. It was tacitly accepted that the only place safe for a woman was to remain at home and stay quiet. Another consequence of these circumstances was that the teachers at local schools were all male and encouraged the girls to not come to school and study. What was the point if at the end of the day a woman’s destiny was to stay at home and cook?

For years, I would be up every day at 8am and every waking hour was devoted to housework and preparing the house to host guests, typically older women and my grandmother’s friends. I was destined to be a homemaker and mother. My life had no meaning outside of those roles.

My brothers would come home from school, excited about mathematics and other subjects. For them, it seemed like life was full of infinite possibilities. Meanwhile I had been confined to be behind the insurmountable walls of my family’s compound. All the possibilities for my life had been collapsed, limited to a single identity and purpose.

At fourteen I had had enough. I needed to find a way out of the mindless routine and depressing destiny. And more specifically, I wanted to understand how complex, and clearly powerful, human social systems, such as politics, economics and culture, combined to create overtly negative outcomes like imbalance and oppression. I made the decision to wake up two hours early every day to learn English, before taking on the day’s expected duties.

My grandfather had a saying, “If you know English, then you don’t have to worry about where the food is going to come from.”

He taught himself English and eventually became a professor of literature and humanities. He had even encouraged his five daughters to pursue advanced education. My aunts became medical doctors and chemists (one an engineer, another a teacher). My mother became a lecturer at a university, a profession she would be forced to leave when the Mujaheddin came to power.

I started by studying newspapers and any book I could get my hands on. My hunger for knowledge proved insatiable.

When my father got the internet, the floodgates of information opened. I found and took online courses through sites like Khan Academy and, later, Coursera.

I was intrigued by discussions between my brothers on mathematics. Countless pages of equations and calculations could propagate from a single, simple question; just like how a complex and towering tree can emerge from a single seed.

Khan Academy provided a superbly structured approach to learning mathematics from scratch. Most importantly, mathematics did not rely on a mastery of English as a prerequisite.

Over the next few years I consumed lesson after lesson, expanding my coursework into physics. I would supplement this unorthodox yet structured education with a more self-directed investigation into philosophy through books like Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. While math and physics helped me develop confidence and ability, ultimately, I was still driven by trying to understand the complexities of human behavior and social systems.

Emily from Iowa

To further develop my hold on English I enrolled in a Skype-based student exchange program and made a critical friend in Emily from Iowa. After only a few conversations, Emily suggested that my English was so good that I should consider taking the SAT and start applying for schools. She soon became a kind of college counselor for me.

Even though my education was stonewalled by an increasingly repressive socio-political establishment, I had the full support of my family. There were no SAT testing locations in Afghanistan. So when it was clear to my family I had the potential to get a college education, my uncle took me across the border into Pakistan, to take the SAT. However, a passport from Afghanistan was required to take the test and, when it was finally granted, it had to be smuggled across the border. Considering that I had no formal education and little time to study for the SAT, I earned a surprisingly competitive score on the exam.

My confidence soared and I convinced my family to make the long trek to the American embassy and apply for a student visa. I was denied in less than sixty seconds! They thought I would end up not studying and becoming an economic burden. I was crushed. And my immaturely formed vision of the world was clearly more idealized than the reality that presented itself and slammed its door in my face. I was even more confused by how the world worked and I immediately became invested in understanding politics.

The New York Times

Emily was constantly working in the background on my behalf, and on the other side of the world, trying to get the word out about my struggle. This became her life’s project, to somehow will me into a position to attend a university. New York Times writer Nicholas Kristoff heard about my story and we conducted an interview over Skype. The story was published in the summer of 2016.

The New York Times opinion piece was published in June. Ironically, I didn’t have much say or influence on the opinion-editorial piece. I felt that the piece was overly provocative.

Even now, because family members still live under the threat of violence, I will not allow myself to be photographed. Suffice to say, I never wanted to stir up trouble, or call attention to myself. Even so, the net results of that article are overwhelmingly positive. I was even offered a scholarship to attend Arizona State University; that was, if I could secure a visa.

I was pessimistic. I had been rejected twice already by what should have been the most logical and straightforward path towards formal education in America. How was this special asylum plea going to result in anything different? But Nicholas Kristoff was absolutely certain I would get it. He gave my case to an immigration lawyer with a relationship to the New York Times. In just a month and a half I was awarded humanitarian parole. This came with some surprising constraints, including having to fly to the U.S. within ten days and a limit of four months to stay there while applying for asylum. As quickly as events were unfolding, I didn’t even hesitate.

As I was approaching America, I realized that over 5,000 miles of water would now separate me from the most influential forces in my life. The last of these flights took me deep into the center of America, about a third of the way around the planet.

The clock was ticking on my time in America – at some point, factors and decisions outside of my control would deign that I was safe to go back to Afghanistan – so I exhausted every opportunity to obtain knowledge while I was isolated from the forces that would keep me from formal education. I petitioned for an earlier than expected winter enrollment at Arizona State University. In the meantime, I continued my self-education through edX classes (coursework from MIT made available online), as well as with Khan Academy and Coursera.

Phoenix

The answer came back from Arizona State University. They had granted me enrollment for the winter quarter. In December of 2016, I flew to the next state in my journey for intellectual independence and began my first full year of formal education at the largest university in America. Mercifully, my tenure in Phoenix began in the cool winter months. In fact, the climate was very similar to what I knew in Afghanistan.

However, as summer approached, I began to have a much different experience. This was the first time I was living on my own. It took me a while to be accustomed to that. I would generally stay in my room and study, even avoiding classes. The intensifying heat of the Arizona sun ensured that I would stay safely and comfortably encased inside. And I was actually doing okay. At first.

Happy as I was to finally be a part of formal education, it was in direct conflict with the way in which I had trained myself to learn. The rebellious spirit which helped me defy the cultural norms and risk harm to myself and my family, the same fire that I had to continuously stoke for years on my own, also made me rebel against the system that actively wanted me to learn. I constantly felt that I had better approaches to absorb the material and actively ignored the homework assignments. Naturally, my grades suffered and I was forced to make a difficult internal adjustment. I also benefited from advice from Emily, as well as a cousin who was pursuing education in Canada.

As I gritted my teeth and made my best attempts to adopt the relatively rigid structures of formal education, I began to feel more and more isolated. I found myself staying in my room day after day, focused simply on studying. But for what purpose? I was aimless. A machine of insatiable learning, but without any specific direction to guide my curiosity. I did not know it at the time, but I was desperate for something to motivate me.

The ripples from the New York Times piece were still reverberating and Sultana was contacted by author Betsy Devine. Betsy was a writer who had written a couple of books with notable scientists. Betsy was particularly interested in introducing Sultana to her husband, Nobel prize winner in physics, Frank Wilczek.

The first time I met Frank Wilczek was at lunch with with him and his wife. Wilczek enjoys hiking in the mountains overlooking surrounding Phoenix and Betsy suggested that I join Frank on an early morning hike. A hike. With Frank Wilczek. This was someone whose book, A Beautiful Question: Finding Nature’s Deep Design, I had read while in Afghanistan. To say that I was nervous is an understatement, but thankfully we fell into an easy flow of conversation. After going over my background and interests he asked me if I was interested in physics. I told him that I was, but I was principally interested in concepts that could be applied very generally, broadly – so that I could better understand the underpinnings of how society functions.

He told me that I should pursue quantum physics. And more specifically, he got me very excited about the prospects of quantum computers. It felt like I was placed at the start of a whole new journey, but I was walking on clouds. I was filled with a confidence that could only be generated by finding oneself comfortable in casual conversation with a Nobel laureate.

Immediately after the hike I went and collected all of the relevant works Wilczek had suggested, including Dirac’s “The Principles of Quantum Mechanics.”

Reborn

With a new sense of purpose, I immersed myself in the formal coursework, as well as my own, self-directed exploration of quantum physics. My drive was rewarded with all A’s in the fall semester of my sophomore year.

That same winter Nicholas Kristoff had published his annual New York Times opinion review of the previous year titled, “Why 2017 Was the Best Year in Human History.” I was mentioned briefly.

It was the start of the second semester of my sophomore year, and I was starting to feel a desire to explore applied physics. I was enrolled in a graduate-level seminar class in quantum theory that spring. One of the lecturers for the class was a young female professor who was interested in entropy, and more importantly, how we can access seemingly lost information. In other words, she wanted access to the unknown.

To that end, she was interested in gauge/gravity duality models like the one meant to explain the black hole “firewall” paradox, or the Anti-de Sitter space/conformal field theory (AdS/CFT) correspondence that uses a model of the universe where space-time has negative, hyperbolic curvature.

The geometry of 5D space-time in AdS space resembles that of an M.C.Escher drawing, where fish wedge themselves together, end-to-end, tighter and tighter as we move away from the origin. These connections between fish are consistent, radiating in an identical pattern, infinitely approaching the edge.

Unbeknownst to me, a friend of that young professor had read the Times opinion article. The article not only mentioned that I had been teaching myself string theory, but also that I was enrolled at Arizona State University and taking graduate level courses. She asked the young professor if she would be interested in meeting me.

The young professor invited me to her office, she told me about how black holes were basically a massive manifestation of entropy, and the best laboratory by which to learn the true nature of information loss, and how it might be reversed. We discussed the possibility of working on a research paper to help her codify the quantum component for her holographic duality models.

I immediately agreed. If there was anything in physics as difficult as understanding human social, religious and political dynamics, it was probably understanding the fundamental nature of space and time. Because the AdS/CFT model of spacetime was negatively curved, we could employ something called holographic quantum error correction to create a framework by which the information of a bulk entity (like a black hole) can be preserved at its boundary, even with some of its physical components (particles) becoming corrupted, or lost.

I spent the year wrestling with, and developing, quantum error correcting codes for a very specific kind of black hole. I learned that information has a way of protecting itself from decay through correlations. For instance, a single logical quantum bit (or “qubit”) of information can be represented, or preserved, by five stand-in, or physical, qubits. At a black hole’s event horizon, where entangled particles are pulled apart, information loss can be prevented as long as less than three-out-of-five of the representative physical qubits are lost to the black hole interior. The original quantum information can be recalled by using a quantum code to reverse this “error”.

By the end of my sophomore year I was nominated to represent Arizona State University at an inaugural event supporting undergraduate women in science. The purpose of the event was to help prepare promising women in physics for graduate school applications, as well as provide information on life as a graduate student. The event, called FUTURE of Physics, was to be held at Caltech.

I mentioned the nomination to Frank Wilczek and he excitedly told me that I must use the opportunity to meet Dr. John Preskill, who was at the forefront of quantum computing and quantum error correction. He reminded me that the best advice he could give anyone was to “find interesting minds and bother them.”

I spent two exciting days at Caltech with 32 other young women from all over the country on November 1st and 2nd of 2018. I was fortunate to meet John Preskill. And of course I introduced myself like any normal human being would, by asking him about the Shor factoring algorithm. I even got to attend a Wednesday group meeting with all of the current faculty and postdocs at IQIM. When I returned to ASU I sent an email to Dr. Preskill inquiring about potentially joining a short research project with his team.

I was extremely relieved when months later I received a response and an invitation to apply for the Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship (SURF) at Caltech. Because Dr. Preskill’s recent work has been at the forefront of quantum error correction for quantum computing it was relatively straightforward to come up with a research proposal that aligned with the interests of my research adviser at ASU.

One of the major obstacles to efficient and widespread proliferation of quantum computers is the corruption of qubits, expensively held in very delicate low-energy states, by environmental interference and noise. People simply don’t, and should not, have confidence in practical, everyday use of quantum computers without reliable quantum error correction. The proposal was to create a proof that, if you’re starting with five physical qubits (representing a single logical qubit) and lose two of those qubits due to error, you can work backwards to recreate the original five qubits, and recover the lost logical qubit in the context of holographic error correcting codes. My application was accepted, and I made my way to Pasadena at the beginning of this summer.

The temperate climate, mountains and lush neighborhoods were a welcome change, especially with the onslaught of relentless heat that was about to envelope Phoenix.

Even at a campus as small as Caltech I felt like the smallest, most insignificant fish in a tiny, albeit prestigious, pond. But soon I was being connected to many like-minded, heavily motivated mathematicians and physicists, from all walks of life and from every corner of the Earth. Seasoned, young post-docs, like Grant Salton and Victor Albert introduced me to HaPPY tensors. HaPPY tensors are a holographic tensor network model developed by Dr. Preskill and colleagues meant to represent a toy model of AdS/CFT. Under this highly accessible and world-class mentorship, and with essentially unlimited resources, I wrestled with HaPPY tensors all summer and successfully discovered a decoder that could recover five qubits from three.

Example of tensor network causal and entanglement wedge reconstructions. From a blog post by Beni Yoshida on March 27th, 2015 on Quantum Frontiers.

This was the ultimate confidence booster. All the years of doubting myself and my ability, due to educating myself in a vacuum, lacking the critical feedback provided by real mentors, all disappeared.

Tomorrow

Now returning to ASU to finish my undergraduate education, I find myself still thinking about what’s next. I still have plans to expand my proof, extending beyond five qubits, to a continuous variable representation, and writing a general algorithm for an arbitrary N layer tensor-network construction. My mentors at Caltech have graciously extended their support to this ongoing work. And I now dream to become a professor of physics at an elite institution where I can continue to pursue the answers to life’s most confusing problems.

My days left in America are not up to me. I am applying for permanent amnesty so I can continue to pursue my academic dreams, and to take a crack at some of the most difficult problems facing humanity, like accelerating the progress towards quantum computing. I know I can’t pursue those goals back in Afghanistan. At least, not yet. Back there, women like myself are expected to stay at home, prepare food and clean the house for everybody else.

Little do they know how terrible I am at housework – and how much I love math.

# Yes, seasoned scientists do extraordinary science.

Imagine that you earned tenure and your field’s acclaim decades ago. Perhaps you received a Nobel Prize. Perhaps you’re directing an institute for science that you helped invent. Do you still do science? Does mentoring youngsters, advising the government, raising funds, disentangling logistics, presenting keynote addresses at conferences, chairing committees, and hosting visitors dominate the time you dedicate to science? Or do you dabble, attend seminars, and read, following progress without spearheading it?

People have asked whether my colleagues do science when weighed down with laurels. The end of August illustrates my answer.

At the end of August, I participated in the eighth Conference on Quantum Information and Quantum Control (CQIQC) at Toronto’s Fields Institute. CQIQC bestows laurels called “the John Stewart Bell Prize” on quantum-information scientists. John Stewart Bell revolutionized our understanding of entanglement, strong correlations that quantum particles can share and that power quantum computing. Aephraim Steinberg, vice-chair of the selection committee, bestowed this year’s award. The award, he emphasized, recognizes achievements accrued during the past six years. This year’s co-winners have been leading quantum information theory for decades. But the past six years earned the winners their prize.

Peter Zoller co-helms IQOQI in Innsbruck. (You can probably guess what the acronym stands for. Hint: The name contains “Quantum” and “Institute.”) Ignacio Cirac is a director of the Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics near Munich. Both winners presented recent work about quantum many-body physics at the conference. You can watch videos of their talks here.

Peter discussed how a lab in Austria and a lab across the world can check whether they’ve prepared the same quantum state. One lab might have trapped ions, while the other has ultracold atoms. The experimentalists might not know which states they’ve prepared, and the experimentalists might have prepared the states at different times. Create multiple copies of the states, Peter recommended, measure the copies randomly, and play mathematical tricks to calculate correlations.

Ignacio expounded upon how to simulate particle physics on a quantum computer formed from ultracold atoms trapped by lasers. For expert readers: Simulate matter fields with fermionic atoms and gauge fields with bosonic atoms. Give the optical lattice the field theory’s symmetries. Translate the field theory’s Lagrangian into Hamiltonian language using Kogut and Susskind’s prescription.

Even before August, I’d collected an arsenal of seasoned scientists who continue to revolutionize their fields. Frank Wilczek shared a physics Nobel Prize for theory undertaken during the 1970s. He and colleagues helped explain matter’s stability: They clarified how close-together quarks (subatomic particles) fail to attract each other, though quarks draw together when far apart. Why stop after cofounding one subfield of physics? Frank spawned another in 2012. He proposed the concept of a time crystal, which is like table salt, except extended across time instead of across space. Experimentalists realized a variation on Frank’s prediction in 2018, and time crystals have exploded across the scientific literature.1

Rudy Marcus is 96 years old. He received a chemistry Nobel Prize, for elucidating how electrons hop between molecules during reactions, in 1992. I took a nonequilibrium-statistical-mechanics course from Rudy four years ago. Ever since, whenever I’ve seen him, he’s asked for the news in quantum information theory. Rudy’s research group operates at Caltech, and you won’t find “Emeritus” in the title on his webpage.

My PhD supervisor, John Preskill, received tenure at Caltech for particle-physics research performed before 1990. You might expect the rest of his career to form an afterthought. But he helped establish quantum computing, starting in the mid-1990s. During the past few years, he co-midwifed the subfield of holographic quantum information theory, which concerns black holes, chaos, and the unification of quantum theory with general relativity. Watching a subfield emerge during my PhD left a mark like a tree on a bicyclist (or would have, if such a mark could uplift instead of injure). John hasn’t helped create subfields only by garnering resources and encouraging youngsters. Several papers by John and collaborators—about topological quantum matter, black holes, quantum error correction, and more—have transformed swaths of physics during the past 15 years. Nor does John stamp his name on many papers: Most publications by members of his group don’t list him as a coauthor.

Do my colleagues do science after laurels pile up on them? The answer sounds to me, in many cases, more like a roar than like a “yes.” Much science done by senior scientists inspires no less than the science that established them. Beyond their results, their enthusiasm inspires. Never mind receiving a Bell Prize. Here’s to working toward deserving a Bell Prize every six years.

With thanks to the Fields Institute, the University of Toronto, Daniel F. V. James, Aephraim Steinberg, and the rest of the conference committee for their invitation and hospitality.

You can find videos of all the conference’s talks here. My talk is shown here

1To scientists, I recommend this Physics Today perspective on time crystals. Few articles have awed and inspired me during the past year as much as this review did.

# Quantum conflict resolution

If only my coauthors and I had quarreled.

I was working with Tony Bartolotta, a PhD student in theoretical physics at Caltech, and Jason Pollack, a postdoc in cosmology at the University of British Columbia. They acted as the souls of consideration. We missed out on dozens of opportunities to bicker—about the paper’s focus, who undertook which tasks, which journal to submit to, and more. Bickering would have spiced up the story behind our paper, because the paper concerns disagreement.

Quantum observables can disagree. Observables are measurable properties, such as position and momentum. Suppose that you’ve measured a quantum particle’s position and obtained an outcome $x$. If you measure the position immediately afterward, you’ll obtain $x$ again. Suppose that, instead of measuring the position again, you measure the momentum. All the possible outcomes have equal probabilities of obtaining. You can’t predict the outcome.

The particle’s position can have a well-defined value, or the momentum can have a well-defined value, but the observables can’t have well-defined values simultaneously. Furthermore, if you measure the position, you randomize the outcome of a momentum measurement. Position and momentum disagree.

How should we quantify the disagreement of two quantum observables, $\hat{A}$ and $\hat{B}$? The question splits physicists into two camps. Pure quantum information (QI) theorists use uncertainty relations, whereas condensed-matter and high-energy physicists prefer out-of-time-ordered correlators. Let’s meet the camps in turn.

Heisenberg intuited an uncertainty relation that Robertson formalized during the 1920s,

$\Delta \hat{A} \, \Delta \hat{B} \geq \frac{1}{i \hbar} \langle [\hat{A}, \hat{B}] \rangle$.

Imagine preparing a quantum state $| \psi \rangle$ and measuring $\hat{A}$, then repeating this protocol in many trials. Each trial has some probability $p_a$ of yielding the outcome $a$. Different trials will yield different $a$’s. We quantify the spread in $a$ values with the standard deviation $\Delta \hat{A} = \sqrt{ \langle \psi | \hat{A}^2 | \psi \rangle - \langle \psi | \hat{A} | \psi \rangle^2 }$. We define $\Delta \hat{B}$ analogously. $\hbar$ denotes Planck’s constant, a number that characterizes our universe as the electron’s mass does.

$[\hat{A}, \hat{B}]$ denotes the observables’ commutator. The numbers that we use in daily life commute: $7 \times 5 = 5 \times 7$. Quantum numbers, or operators, represent $\hat{A}$ and $\hat{B}$. Operators don’t necessarily commute. The commutator $[\hat{A}, \hat{B}] = \hat{A} \hat{B} - \hat{B} \hat{A}$ represents how little $\hat{A}$ and $\hat{B}$ resemble 7 and 5.

Robertson’s uncertainty relation means, “If you can predict an $\hat{A}$ measurement’s outcome precisely, you can’t predict a $\hat{B}$ measurement’s outcome precisely, and vice versa. The uncertainties must multiply to at least some number. The number depends on how much $\hat{A}$ fails to commute with $\hat{B}$.” The higher an uncertainty bound (the greater the inequality’s right-hand side), the more the operators disagree.

Heisenberg and Robertson explored operator disagreement during the 1920s. They wouldn’t have seen eye to eye with today’s QI theorists. For instance, QI theorists consider how we can apply quantum phenomena, such as operator disagreement, to information processing. Information processing includes cryptography. Quantum cryptography benefits from operator disagreement: An eavesdropper must observe, or measure, a message. The eavesdropper’s measurement of one observable can “disturb” a disagreeing observable. The message’s sender and intended recipient can detect the disturbance and so detect the eavesdropper.

How efficiently can one perform an information-processing task? The answer usually depends on an entropy $H$, a property of quantum states and of probability distributions. Uncertainty relations cry out for recasting in terms of entropies. So QI theorists have devised entropic uncertainty relations, such as

$H (\hat{A}) + H( \hat{B} ) \geq - \log c. \qquad (^*)$

The entropy $H( \hat{A} )$ quantifies the difficulty of predicting the outcome $a$ of an $\hat{A}$ measurement. $H( \hat{B} )$ is defined analogously. $c$ is called the overlap. It quantifies your ability to predict what happens if you prepare your system with a well-defined $\hat{A}$ value, then measure $\hat{B}$. For further analysis, check out this paper. Entropic uncertainty relations have blossomed within QI theory over the past few years.

Pure QI theorists, we’ve seen, quantify operator disagreement with entropic uncertainty relations. Physicists at the intersection of condensed matter and high-energy physics prefer out-of-time-ordered correlators (OTOCs). I’ve blogged about OTOCs so many times, Quantum Frontiers regulars will be able to guess the next two paragraphs.

Consider a quantum many-body system, such as a chain of qubits. Imagine poking one end of the system, such as by flipping the first qubit upside-down. Let the operator $\hat{W}$ represent the poke. Suppose that the system evolves chaotically for a time $t$ afterward, the qubits interacting. Information about the poke spreads through many-body entanglement, or scrambles.

Imagine measuring an observable $\hat{V}$ of a few qubits far from the $\hat{W}$ qubits. A little information about $\hat{W}$ migrates into the $\hat{V}$ qubits. But measuring $\hat{V}$ reveals almost nothing about $\hat{W}$, because most of the information about $\hat{W}$ has spread across the system. $\hat{V}$ disagrees with $\hat{W}$, in a sense. Actually, $\hat{V}$ disagrees with $\hat{W}(t)$. The $(t)$ represents the time evolution.

The OTOC’s smallness reflects how much $\hat{W}(t)$ disagrees with $\hat{V}$ at any instant $t$. At early times $t \gtrsim 0$, the operators agree, and the OTOC $\approx 1$. At late times, the operators disagree loads, and the OTOC $\approx 0$.

Different camps of physicists, we’ve seen, quantify operator disagreement with different measures: Today’s pure QI theorists use entropic uncertainty relations. Condensed-matter and high-energy physicists use OTOCs. Trust physicists to disagree about what “quantum operator disagreement” means.

I want peace on Earth. I conjectured, in 2016 or so, that one could reconcile the two notions of quantum operator disagreement. One must be able to prove an entropic uncertainty relation for scrambling, wouldn’t you think?

You might try substituting $\hat{W}(t)$ for the $\hat{A}$ in Ineq. ${(^*)}$, and $\hat{V}$ for the $\hat{B}$. You’d expect the uncertainty bound to tighten—the inequality’s right-hand side to grow—when the system scrambles. Scrambling—the condensed-matter and high-energy-physics notion of disagreement—would coincide with a high uncertainty bound—the pure-QI-theory notion of disagreement. The two notions of operator disagreement would agree. But the bound I’ve described doesn’t reflect scrambling. Nor do similar bounds that I tried constructing. I banged my head against the problem for about a year.

The sky brightened when Jason and Tony developed an interest in the conjecture. Their energy and conversation enabled us to prove an entropic uncertainty relation for scrambling, published this month.1 We tested the relation in computer simulations of a qubit chain. Our bound tightens when the system scrambles, as expected: The uncertainty relation reflects the same operator disagreement as the OTOC. We reconciled two notions of quantum operator disagreement.

As Quantum Frontiers regulars will anticipate, our uncertainty relation involves weak measurements and quasiprobability distributions: I’ve been studying their roles in scrambling over the past three years, with colleagues for whose collaborations I have the utmost gratitude. I’m grateful to have collaborated with Tony and Jason. Harmony helps when you’re tackling (quantum operator) disagreement—even if squabbling would spice up your paper’s backstory.

1Thanks to Communications Physics for publishing the paper. For pedagogical formatting, read the arXiv version.

# What distinguishes quantum thermodynamics from quantum statistical mechanics?

Yoram Alhassid asked the question at the end of my Yale Quantum Institute colloquium last February. I knew two facts about Yoram: (1) He belongs to Yale’s theoretical-physics faculty. (2) His PhD thesis’s title—“On the Information Theoretic Approach to Nuclear Reactions”—ranks among my three favorites.1

Over the past few months, I’ve grown to know Yoram better. He had reason to ask about quantum statistical mechanics, because his research stands up to its ears in the field. If forced to synopsize quantum statistical mechanics in five words, I’d say, “study of many-particle quantum systems.” Examples include gases of ultracold atoms. If given another five words, I’d add, “Calculate and use partition functions.” A partition function is a measure of the number of states, or configurations, accessible to the system. Calculate a system’s partition function, and you can calculate the system’s average energy, the average number of particles in the system, how the system responds to magnetic fields, etc.

My colloquium concerned quantum thermodynamics, which I’ve blogged about many times. So I should have been able to distinguish quantum thermodynamics from its neighbors. But the answer I gave Yoram didn’t satisfy me. I mulled over the exchange for a few weeks, then emailed Yoram a 502-word essay. The exercise grew my appreciation for the question and my understanding of my field.

An adaptation of the email appears below. The adaptation should suit readers who’ve majored in physics, but don’t worry if you haven’t. Bits of what distinguishes quantum thermodynamics from quantum statistical mechanics should come across to everyone—as should, I hope, the value of question-and-answer sessions:

One distinction is a return to the operational approach of 19th-century thermodynamics. Thermodynamicists such as Sadi Carnot wanted to know how effectively engines could operate. Their practical questions led to fundamental insights, such as the Carnot bound on an engine’s efficiency. Similarly, quantum thermodynamicists often ask, “How can this state serve as a resource in thermodynamic tasks?” This approach helps us identify what distinguishes quantum theory from classical mechanics.

For example, quantum thermodynamicists found an advantage in charging batteries via nonlocal operations. Another example is the “MBL-mobile” that I designed with collaborators. Many-body localization (MBL), we found, can enhance an engine’s reliability and scalability.

Asking, “How can this state serve as a resource?” leads quantum thermodynamicists to design quantum engines, ratchets, batteries, etc. We analyze how these devices can outperform classical analogues, identifying which aspects of quantum theory power the outperformance. This question and these tasks contrast with the questions and tasks of many non-quantum-thermodynamicists who use statistical mechanics. They often calculate response functions and (e.g., ground-state) properties of Hamiltonians.

These goals of characterizing what nonclassicality is and what it can achieve in thermodynamic contexts resemble upshots of quantum computing and cryptography. As a 21st-century quantum information scientist, I understand what makes quantum theory quantum partially by understanding which problems quantum computers can solve efficiently and classical computers can’t. Similarly, I understand what makes quantum theory quantum partially by understanding how much more work you can extract from a singlet $\frac{1}{ \sqrt{2} } ( | 0 1 \rangle - |1 0 \rangle )$ (a maximally entangled state of two qubits) than from a product state in which the reduced states have the same forms as in the singlet, $\frac{1}{2} ( | 0 \rangle \langle 0 | + | 1 \rangle \langle 1 | )$.

As quantum thermodynamics shares its operational approach with quantum information theory, quantum thermodynamicists use mathematical tools developed in quantum information theory. An example consists of generalized entropies. Entropies quantify the optimal efficiency with which we can perform information-processing and thermodynamic tasks, such as data compression and work extraction.

Most statistical-mechanics researchers use just the Shannon and von Neumann entropies, $H_{\rm Sh}$ and $H_{\rm vN}$, and perhaps the occasional relative entropy. These entropies quantify optimal efficiencies in large-system limits, e.g., as the number of messages compressed approaches infinity and in the thermodynamic limit.

Other entropic quantities have been defined and explored over the past two decades, in quantum and classical information theory. These entropies quantify the optimal efficiencies with which tasks can be performed (i) if the number of systems processed or the number of trials is arbitrary, (ii) if the systems processed share correlations, (iii) in the presence of “quantum side information” (if the system being used as a resource is entangled with another system, to which an agent has access), or (iv) if you can tolerate some probability $\varepsilon$ that you fail to accomplish your task. Instead of limiting ourselves to $H_{\rm Sh}$ and $H_{\rm vN}$, we use also “$\varepsilon$-smoothed entropies,” Rényi divergences, hypothesis-testing entropies, conditional entropies, etc.

Another hallmark of quantum thermodynamics is results’ generality and simplicity. Thermodynamics characterizes a system with a few macroscopic observables, such as temperature, volume, and particle number. The simplicity of some quantum thermodynamics served a chemist collaborator and me, as explained in the introduction of https://arxiv.org/abs/1811.06551.

Yoram’s question reminded me of one reason why, as an undergrad, I adored studying physics in a liberal-arts college. I ate dinner and took walks with students majoring in economics, German studies, and Middle Eastern languages. They described their challenges, which I analyzed with the physics mindset that I was acquiring. We then compared our approaches. Encountering other disciplines’ perspectives helped me recognize what tools I was developing as a budding physicist. How can we know our corner of the world without stepping outside it and viewing it as part of a landscape?

1The title epitomizes clarity and simplicity. And I have trouble resisting anything advertised as “the information-theoretic approach to such-and-such.”

# The importance of being open

Barcelona refused to stay indoors this May.

Merchandise spilled outside shops onto the streets, restaurateurs parked diners under trees, and ice-cream cones begged to be eaten on park benches. People thronged the streets, markets filled public squares, and the scents of flowers wafted from vendors’ stalls. I couldn’t blame the city. Its sunshine could have drawn Merlin out of his crystal cave. Insofar as a city lives, Barcelona epitomized a quotation by thermodynamicist Ilya Prigogine: “The main character of any living system is openness.”

Prigogine (1917–2003), who won the Nobel Prize for chemistry, had brought me to Barcelona. I was honored to receive, at the Joint European Thermodynamics Conference (JETC) there, the Ilya Prigogine Prize for a thermodynamics PhD thesis. The JETC convenes and awards the prize biennially; the last conference had taken place in Budapest. Barcelona suited the legacy of a thermodynamicist who illuminated open systems.

The conference center. Not bad, eh?

Ilya Prigogine began his life in Russia, grew up partially in Germany, settled in Brussels, and worked at American universities. His nobelprize.org biography reveals a mind open to many influences and disciplines: Before entering university, his “interest was more focused on history and archaeology, not to mention music, especially piano.” Yet Prigogine pursued chemistry.

He helped extend thermodynamics outside equilibrium. Thermodynamics is the study of energy, order, and time’s arrow in terms of large-scale properties, such as temperature, pressure, and volume. Many physicists think that thermodynamics describes only equilibrium. Equilibrium is a state of matter in which (1) large-scale properties remain mostly constant and (2) stuff (matter, energy, electric charge, etc.) doesn’t flow in any particular direction much. Apple pies reach equilibrium upon cooling on a countertop. When I’ve described my research as involving nonequilibrium thermodynamics, some colleagues have asked whether I’ve used an oxymoron. But “nonequilibrium thermodynamics” appears in Prigogine’s Nobel Lecture.

Ilya Prigogine

Another Nobel laureate, Lars Onsager, helped extend thermodynamics a little outside equilibrium. He imagined poking a system gently, as by putting a pie on a lukewarm stovetop or a magnet in a weak magnetic field. (Experts: Onsager studied the linear-response regime.) You can read about his work in my blog post “Long live Yale’s cemetery.” Systems poked slightly out of equilibrium tend to return to equilibrium: Equilibrium is stable. Systems flung far from equilibrium, as Prigogine showed, can behave differently.

A system can stay far from equilibrium by interacting with other systems. Imagine placing an apple pie atop a blistering stove. Heat will flow from the stove through the pie into the air. The pie will stay out of equilibrium due to interactions with what we call a “hot reservoir” (the stove) and a “cold reservoir” (the air). Systems (like pies) that interact with other systems (like stoves and air), we call “open.”

You and I are open: We inhale air, ingest food and drink, expel waste, and radiate heat. Matter and energy flow through us; we remain far from equilibrium. A bumper sticker in my high-school chemistry classroom encapsulated our status: “Old chemists don’t die. They come to equilibrium.” We remain far from equilibrium—alive—because our environment provides food and absorbs heat. If I’m an apple pie, the yogurt that I ate at breakfast serves as my stovetop, and the living room in which I breakfasted serves as the air above the stove. We live because of our interactions with our environments, because we’re open. Hence Prigogine’s claim, “The main character of any living system is openness.”

The author

JETC 2019 fostered openness. The conference sessions spanned length scales and mass scales, from quantum thermodynamics to biophysics to gravitation. One could arrive as an expert in cell membranes and learn about astrophysics.

I remain grateful for the prize-selection committee’s openness. The topics of earlier winning theses include desalination, colloidal suspensions, and falling liquid films. If you tipped those topics into a tube, swirled them around, and capped the tube with a kaleidoscope glass, you might glimpse my thesis’s topic, quantum steampunk. Also, of the nine foregoing Prigogine Prize winners, only one had earned his PhD in the US. I’m grateful for the JETC’s consideration of something completely different.

When Prigogine said, “openness,” he referred to exchanges of energy and mass. Humans can exhibit openness also to ideas. The JETC honored Prigogine’s legacy in more ways than one. Here’s hoping I live up to their example.