arXiv subjects

Graham Kells

Publications and source records attributed to Graham Kells.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Typical Entanglement of Superpositions

We investigate universal entanglement properties inherent to superpositions of randomized states. We find that an $m$-fold superposition of typical states may be classified into two distinct entanglement classes via the 2nd R\'enyi entropy density $s_2$. The maximally entangled regime is defined by $s_2 \sim \ln (2)$, for which superposition adds no additional entanglement. The sub-maximally entangled regime, $s_2<\ln 2$, instead constrains the reduced density matrices of independent components to be orthogonal in the thermodynamic limit, which fixes the entanglement of the superposition to a logarithmic enhancement $\Delta S(m)=\ln (m)$. As a consequence, an exponentially large number of superpositions is required to transition from the sub-maximally entangled class to maximal entanglement. We explicitly calculate $s_2$ and the logarithmic enhancement, and demonstrate orthogonality for two canonical examples of the sub-maximally entangled regime (superpositions of pure Gaussian states and of random matrix-product states). We also examine the entanglement of superpositions of random stabilizer states, and discuss their relaxation to the Haar limit.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2026

Mapping the non-equilibrium interacting Anderson Impurity Model to an effective Gaussian theory

Quantum impurity models with strong electron correlations, such as the paradigmatic Anderson Impurity Model (AIM), are central to our understanding of a range of physical phenomena including local moment formation, Coulomb blockade and Kondo screening. They describe magnetic atoms and molecules on surfaces, quantum dot circuits, and correlated materials through dynamical mean field theory. The physics of such systems in strongly non-equilibrium conditions is particularly complex and challenging to capture, whereas Gaussian models of free fermions can be easily solved. Here we show that the time-evolving dynamics of the AIM after a quench can be described by a completely non-interacting version of the model, at the expense of coupling to additional static auxiliary degrees of freedom. Starting from the full solution of the quenched AIM using ED and DMRG, we study the properties of this mapping using numerical optimization, and uncover intriguing structure in the auxiliary system. The method allows us to understand interacting non-equilibrium dynamics through the simpler lens of an effective non-interacting system of larger dimension.

cond-mat.str-el↗

arXiv2025

Measurement Induced Dynamics and Trace Preserving Replica Cutoffs

We present a general methodology for addressing the infinite hierarchy problem that arises in measurement-induced dynamics of replicated quantum systems. Our approach introduces trace-preserving replica cutoffs using tomographic-like techniques to estimate higher-order replica states from lower ones, ensuring that partial trace reduction properties are rigorously maintained. This guarantees that the dynamics of single-replica systems correctly reduce to standard Lindblad evolution. By systematically mapping information between replica spaces of different orders, we characterise null spaces under partial trace operations and outline efficient algorithmic approaches to enforce positivity. Importantly, it is demonstrated that pre-calculated stochastic Gaussian ensembles of free fermion states provide an effective and computationally efficient means to stabilise the replica hierarchy, even in the presence of interactions. Numerical tests on small interacting fermionic systems illustrate the effectiveness and practicality of our approach, showing precise agreement with trajectory methods while providing significantly better statistical convergence.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2024

Topological fingerprints in Liouvillian gaps

Topology in many-body physics usually emerges as a feature of equilibrium quantum states. We show that topological fingerprints can also appear in the relaxation rates of open quantum systems. To demonstrate this we consider one of the simplest models that has two topologically distinct phases in its ground state: the Kitaev chain model for the $p$-wave superconductor. After introducing dissipation to this model we estimate the Liouvillian gap in both strong and weak dissipative limits. Our results show that a non-zero superconducting pairing opens a Liouvillian gap that remains open in the limit of infinite system size. At strong dissipation this gap is essentially unaffected by the topology of the underlying Hamiltonian ground state. In contrast, when dissipation is weak, the topological phase of the Hamiltonian ground state plays a crucial role in determining the character of the Liouvillian gap. We find, for example, that in the topological phase this gap is completely immune to changes in the chemical potential. On the other hand, in the non-topological phase the Liouvillian gap is suppressed by a large chemical potential.

cond-mat.str-el↗

arXiv2022

Data-Driven Time Propagation of Quantum Systems with Neural Networks

We investigate the potential of supervised machine learning to propagate a quantum system in time. While Markovian dynamics can be learned easily, given a sufficient amount of data, non-Markovian systems are non-trivial and their description requires the memory knowledge of past states. Here we analyse the feature of such memory by taking a simple 1D Heisenberg model as many-body Hamiltonian, and construct a non-Markovian description by representing the system over the single-particle reduced density matrix. The number of past states required for this representation to reproduce the time-dependent dynamics is found to grow exponentially with the number of spins and with the density of the system spectrum. Most importantly, we demonstrate that neural networks can work as time propagators at any time in the future and that they can be concatenated in time forming an autoregression. Such neural-network autoregression can be used to generate long-time and arbitrary dense time trajectories. Finally, we investigate the time resolution needed to represent the system memory. We find two regimes: for fine memory samplings the memory needed remains constant, while longer memories are required for coarse samplings, although the total number of time steps remains constant. The boundary between these two regimes is set by the period corresponding to the highest frequency in the system spectrum, demonstrating that neural network can overcome the limitation set by the Shannon-Nyquist sampling theorem.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2021

Topological transitions with continuously monitored free fermions

We study a free fermion model where two sets of non-commuting non-projective measurements stabilize area-law entanglement scaling phases of distinct topological order. We show the presence of a topological phase transition that is of a different universality class than that observed in stroboscopic projective circuits. In the presence of unitary dynamics, the two topologically distinct phases are separated by a region with sub-volume scaling of the entanglement entropy. We find that this entanglement transition is well identified by a combination of the bipartite entanglement entropy and the topological entanglement entropy. We further show that the phase diagram is qualitatively captured by an analytically tractable non-Hermitian model obtained via post-selecting the measurement outcome. Finally we introduce a partial-post-selection continuous mapping, that uniquely associates topological indices of the non-Hermitian Hamiltonian to the distinct phases of the stochastic measurement-induced dynamics.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2021

Extreme many-body scarring in a quantum spin chain via weak dynamical constraints

It has recently been established that quantum many-body scarring can prevent the thermalisation of some isolated quantum systems, starting from certain initial states. One of the first models to show this was the so-called PXP Hamiltonian, which was used to theoretically model an experiment on a chain of strongly interacting Rydberg atoms. A defining feature of the PXP Hamiltonian is a set of dynamical constraints that make certain states inaccessible to the dynamics. In this paper we construct a class of spin chain models that are parameterised by a discrete variable $\ell$ that controls the "strength" of a dynamical constraint. We show that by increasing $\ell$ the constraint becomes weaker, in the sense that fewer states are excluded from the dynamics. The PXP Hamiltonian is special case for $\ell = 2$. By weakening the constraint to $\ell \geq 4$, however, we find a more extreme version of quantum scarring than in the PXP Hamiltonian, with the number of scar states growing exponentially in the system size.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2020

Dynamical Phase Error in Interacting Topological Quantum Memories

A local Hamiltonian with Topological Quantum Order (TQO) has a robust ground state degeneracy that makes it an excellent quantum memory candidate. This memory can be corrupted however if part of the state leaves the protected ground state manifold and returns later with a dynamically accrued phase error. Here we analyse how TQO suppresses this process and use this to quantify the degree to which spectral densities in different topological sectors are correlated. We provide numerical verification of our results by modelling an interacting p-wave superconducting wire.

cond-mat.str-el↗

arXiv2020

Protocol Discovery for the Quantum Control of Majoranas by Differentiable Programming and Natural Evolution Strategies

Quantum control, which refers to the active manipulation of physical systems described by the laws of quantum mechanics, constitutes an essential ingredient for the development of quantum technology. Here we apply Differentiable Programming (DP) and Natural Evolution Strategies (NES) to the optimal transport of Majorana zero modes in superconducting nanowires, a key element to the success of Majorana-based topological quantum computation. We formulate the motion control of Majorana zero modes as an optimization problem for which we propose a new categorization of four different regimes with respect to the critical velocity of the system and the total transport time. In addition to correctly recovering the anticipated smooth protocols in the adiabatic regime, our algorithms uncover efficient but strikingly counter-intuitive motion strategies in the non-adiabatic regime. The emergent picture reveals a simple but high fidelity strategy that makes use of pulse-like jumps at the beginning and the end of the protocol with a period of constant velocity in between the jumps, which we dub the jump-move-jump protocol. We provide a transparent semi-analytical picture, which uses the sudden approximation and a reformulation of the Majorana motion in a moving frame, to illuminate the key characteristics of the jump-move-jump control strategy. We verify that the jump-move-jump protocol remains robust against the presence of interactions or disorder, and corroborate its high efficacy on a realistic proximity coupled nanowire model. Our results demonstrate that machine learning for quantum control can be applied efficiently to quantum many-body dynamical systems with performance levels that make it relevant to the realization of large-scale quantum technology.

cond-mat.str-el↗

arXiv2020

Enhancing the effect of quantum many-body scars on dynamics by minimising the effective dimension

Quantum many-body scarring is believed to be the mechanism behind long-lived coherent oscillations in interacting Rydberg atom chains. These persistent oscillations are due to the large overlap of the many-body scars with certain initial states. We show that the "effective dimension" is a useful measure for identifying non-thermalising initial states in many-body scarred systems. By minimising the effective dimension we find physically reasonable initial states of the Rydberg chain that lead to more pronounced and longer lived oscillations, accentuating the effect of the many-body scars on the dynamics.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2020

Constrained thermalisation and topological superconductivity

We examine the thermalisation/localization trade off in an interacting and disordered Kitaev model, specifically addressing whether signatures of many-body localization can coexist with the systems topological phase. Using methods applicable to finite size systems, (e.g. the generalized one-particle density matrix, eigenstate entanglement entropy, inverse zero modes coherence length) we identify a regime of parameter space in the vicinity of the non-interacting limit where topological superconductivity survives together with a significant violation of Eigenstate-Thermalisation-Hypothesis (ETH) at finite energy-densities. We further identify an anomalous behaviour of the von Neumann entanglement entropy which can be attributed to the prethermalisation-like effects that occur due to lack of hybridization between high-energy eigenstates reflecting an approximate particle conservation law. In this regime the system tends to thermalise to a generalised Gibbs ensemble (as opposed to the grand canonical ensemble). Moderate disorder tends to drive the system towards stronger hybridization and a standard thermal ensemble, where the approximate conservation law is violated. This behaviour is cutoff by strong disorder which obstructs many body effects thus violating ETH and reducing the entanglement entropy.

cond-mat.str-el↗

arXiv2019

Impossible measurements revisited

It is by now well-recognised that the na\"ive application of the projection postulate on composite quantum systems can induce signalling between their constituent components, indicative of a breakdown of causality in a relativistic spacetime context. Here we introduce a necessary and sufficient condition for an ideal measurement of an observable to be non-signalling. As well as being particularly simple, it generalises previous no-signalling conditions in that it allows for degeneracies and can be applied to all bounded self-adjoint operators. The condition is used to establish that arbitrary sums of local observables will not signal, in accordance with our expectations from relativistic quantum field theory. On the other hand, it is shown that the measurement of the tensor product of commuting local observables, for example bipartite operators of the form $A\otimes B$, can in fact signal, contrary to the widely-held belief that such measurements are always locally realisable. The implications for the notion of measurement in relativistic quantum field theory are addressed; it appears that the most straightforward application of the standard quantum formalism generically leads to violations of causality. We conclude that either the class of observables that can be measured should be restricted and/or that the na\"ive translation of the measurement framework of quantum theory, in particular the projection postulate, to quantum field theory should be re-evaluated.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2019

Constructing edge zero modes through domain wall angle conservation

We investigate the existence, normalization and explicit construction of edge zero modes in topologically ordered spin chains. In particular we give a detailed treatment of zero modes in a $\mathbb{Z}_3$ generalization of the Ising/Kitaev chain, which can also be described in terms of parafermions. We analyze when it is possible to iteratively construct strong zero modes, working completely in the spin picture. An important role is played by the so called total domain wall angle, a symmetry which appears in all models with strong zero modes that we are aware of. We show that preservation of this symmetry guarantees locality of the iterative construction, that is, it imposes locality conditions on the successive terms appearing in the zero mode's perturbative expansion. The method outlined here summarizes and generalizes some of the existing techniques used to construct zero modes in spin chains and sheds light on some surprising common features of all these types of methods. We conjecture a general algorithm for the perturbative construction of zero mode operators and test this on a variety of models, to the highest order we can manage. We also present analytical formulas for the zero modes which apply to all models investigated, but which feature a number of model dependent coefficients.

cond-mat.str-el↗

arXiv2019

Simulating quantum circuits by adiabatic computation: improved spectral gap bounds

Adiabatic quantum computing is a framework for quantum computing that is superficially very different to the standard circuit model. However, it can be shown that the two models are computationally equivalent. The key to the proof is a mapping of a quantum circuit to an an adiabatic evolution, and then showing that the minimum spectral gap of the adiabatic Hamiltonian is at least inverse polynomial in the number of computational steps $L$. In this paper we provide two simplified proofs that the gap is inverse polynomial. Both proofs result in the same lower bound for the minimum gap, which for $L \gg 1$ is $\min_s\Delta \gtrsim \pi^2 / [8(L+1)^2]$, an improvement over previous estimates. Our first method is a direct approach based on an eigenstate ansatz, while the the second uses Weyl's theorem to leverage known exact results into a bound for the gap. Our results suggest that it may be possible to use these methods to find bounds for spectral gaps of Hamiltonians in other scenarios.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2019

Error generation and propagation in Majorana-based topological qubits

We investigate dynamical evolution of a topological memory that consists of two p-wave superconducting wires separated by a non-topological junction, focusing on the primary errors (i.e., qubit-loss) and secondary errors (bit and phase-flip) that arise due to non-adiabaticity. On the question of qubit-loss we examine the system's response to both periodic boundary driving and deliberate shuttling of the Majorana bound states. In the former scenario we show how the frequency dependent rate of qubit-loss is strongly correlated with the local density of states at the edge of wire, a fact that can make systems with a larger gap more susceptible to high frequency noise. In the second scenario we confirm previous predictions concerning super-adiabaticity and critical velocity, but see no evidence that the coordinated movement of edge boundaries reduces qubit-loss. Our analysis on secondary bit flip errors shows that it is necessary that non-adiabaticity occurs in both wires and that inter-wire tunnelling be present for this error channel to be open. We also demonstrate how such processes can be minimised by disordering central regions of both wires. Finally we identify an error channel for phase flip errors, which can occur due to mismatches in the energies of states with bulk excitations. In the non-interacting system considered here this error systematically opposes the expected phase rotation due to finite size splitting in the qubit subspace.

cond-mat.mes-hall↗

arXiv2017

Localization-enhanced and degraded topological-order in interacting p-wave wires

We numerically study the effect of disorder on the stability of the many body zero mode in a Kitaev chain with local interactions. Our numerical procedure allows us to resolve the position-space and multi-particle structure of the zero modes, as well as providing estimates for the mean energy splitting between pairs of states of opposite fermion parity, over the full many-body spectrum. We find that the parameter space of a clean system can be divided into regions where interaction induced decay transitions are suppressed (Region I) and where they are not (Region II). In Region I we observe that disorder has an adverse effect on the zero mode, which extends further into the bulk and is accompanied by an increased energy splitting between pairs of states of opposite parity. Conversely Region II sees a more intricate effect of disorder, showing an enhancement of localization at the system's end accompanied by a reduction in the mean pairwise energy splitting. We discuss our results in the context of the Many-Body Localization (MBL). We show that while the mechanism that drives the MBL transition also contributes to the fock-space localization of the many-body zero modes, measures that characterize the degree of MBL do not necessarily correlate with an enhancement of the zero-mode or an improved stability of the topological region.

cond-mat.str-el↗

arXiv2017

Parafermionic clock models and quantum resonance

We explore the $\mathbb{Z}_{N}$ parafermionic clock-model generalisations of the p-wave Majorana wire model. In particular we examine whether zero-mode operators analogous to Majorana zero-modes can be found in these models when one introduces chiral parameters to break time reversal symmetry. The existence of such zero-modes implies $N$-fold degeneracies throughout the energy spectrum. We address the question directly through these degeneracies by characterising the entire energy spectrum using perturbation theory and exact diagonalisation. We find that when $N$ is prime, and the length $L$ of the wire is finite, the spectrum exhibits degeneracies up to a splitting that decays exponentially with system size, for generic values of the chiral parameters. However, at particular parameter values (resonance points), band crossings appear in the unperturbed spectrum that typically result in a splitting of the degeneracy at finite order. We find strong evidence that these preclude the existence of strong zero-modes for generic values of the chiral parameters. In particular we show that in the thermodynamic limit, the resonance points become dense in the chiral parameter space. When $N$ is not prime, the situation is qualitatively different, and degeneracies in the energy spectrum are split at finite order in perturbation theory for generic parameter values, even when the length of the wire $L$ is finite. Exceptions to these general findings can occur at special "anti-resonant" points. Here the evidence points to the existence of strong zero modes and, in the case of the achiral point of the the $N=4$ model, we are able to construct these modes exactly.

cond-mat.str-el↗

arXiv2013

Kitaev spin models from topological nanowire networks

We show that networks of topological nanowires can realize the physics of exactly solvable Kitaev spin models with two-body interactions. This connection arises from the description of the low-energy theory of both systems in terms of a tight-binding model of Majorana modes. In Kitaev spin models the Majorana description provides a convenient representation to solve the model, whereas in an array of topological nanowires it arises, because the physical Majorana modes localized at wire ends permit tunnelling between wire ends and across different Josephson junctions. We explicitly show that an array of junctions of three wires -- a setup relevant to topological quantum computing with nanowires -- can realize the Yao-Kivelson model, a variant of Kitaev spin models on a decorated honeycomb lattice. Translating the results from the latter, we show that the network can be constructed to give rise to collective states characterized by Chern numbers \nu = 0, +/-1 and +/-2, and that defects in an array can be associated with vortex-like quasi-particle excitations. Finally, we analyze the stability of the collective states as well as that of the network as a quantum information processor. We show that decoherence inducing instabilities, be them due to disorder or phase fluctuations, can be understood in terms of proliferation of the vortex-like quasi-particles.

cond-mat.mes-hall↗