Information Scrambling in Computationally Complex Quantum Circuits
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Information Scrambling in Computationally Complex Quantum Circuits Xiao Mi,1, ∗ Pedram Roushan,1, ∗ Chris Quintana,1, ∗ Salvatore Mandr`a,2, 3 Jeffrey Marshall,2, 4 Charles Neill,1 Frank Arute,1 Kunal Arya,1 Juan Atalaya,1 Ryan Babbush,1 Joseph C. Bardin,1, 5 Rami Barends,1 Andreas Bengtsson,1 Sergio Boixo,1 Alexandre Bourassa,1, 6 Michael Broughton,1 Bob B. Buckley,1 David A. Buell,1 Brian Burkett,1 Nicholas Bushnell,1 Zijun Chen,1 Benjamin Chiaro,1 Roberto Collins,1 William Courtney,1 Sean Demura,1 Alan R. Derk,1 Andrew Dunsworth,1 Daniel Eppens,1 Catherine Erickson,1 Edward Farhi,1 Austin G. Fowler,1 Brooks Foxen,1 Craig Gidney,1 Marissa Giustina,1 Jonathan A. Gross,1 Matthew P. Harrigan,1 Sean D. Harrington,1 Jeremy Hilton,1 Alan Ho,1 Sabrina Hong,1 Trent Huang,1 William J. Huggins,1 L. B. Ioffe,1 Sergei V. Isakov,1 Evan Jeffrey,1 Zhang Jiang,1 Cody Jones,1 Dvir Kafri,1 Julian Kelly,1 Seon Kim,1 Alexei Kitaev,1, 7 Paul V. Klimov,1 Alexander N. Korotkov,1, 8 Fedor Kostritsa,1 David Landhuis,1 Pavel Laptev,1 Erik Lucero,1 Orion Martin,1 Jarrod R. McClean,1 Trevor McCourt,1 Matt McEwen,1, 9 Anthony Megrant,1 Kevin C. Miao,1 Masoud Mohseni,1 Wojciech Mruczkiewicz,1 Josh Mutus,1 Ofer Naaman,1 Matthew Neeley,1 Michael Newman,1 Murphy Yuezhen Niu,1 Thomas E. O'Brien,1 Alex Opremcak,1 Eric Ostby,1 Balint Pato,1 Andre Petukhov,1 Nicholas Redd,1 Nicholas C. Rubin,1 Daniel Sank,1 Kevin J. Satzinger,1 Vladimir Shvarts,1 Doug Strain,1 Marco Szalay,1 Matthew D. Trevithick,1 Benjamin Villalonga,1 Theodore White,1 Z. Jamie Yao,1 Ping Yeh,1 Adam Zalcman,1 Hartmut Neven,1 Igor Aleiner,1 Kostyantyn Kechedzhi,1, y Vadim Smelyanskiy,1, z and Yu Chen1, x 1Google Research 2QuAIL, NASA Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, California 94035, USA 3KBR, Inc., 601 Jefferson St., Houston, TX 77002, USA 4USRA Research Institute for Advanced Computer Science, Mountain View, California 94043, USA 5Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, MA 6Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering, University of Chicago, Chicago, IL 7California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, CA 91125 8Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of California, Riverside, CA 9Department of Physics, University of California, Santa Barbara, CA Interaction in quantum systems can spread initially localized quantum information into the many degrees of freedom of the entire system. Understanding this process, known as quantum scrambling, is the key to resolving various conundrums in physics. Here, by measuring the time-dependent evo- lution and fluctuation of out-of-time-order correlators, we experimentally investigate the dynamics of quantum scrambling on a 53-qubit quantum processor. We engineer quantum circuits that dis- tinguish the two mechanisms associated with quantum scrambling, operator spreading and operator entanglement, and experimentally observe their respective signatures. We show that while operator spreading is captured by an efficient classical model, operator entanglement requires exponentially scaled computational resources to simulate. These results open the path to studying complex and practically relevant physical observables with near-term quantum processors. The inception of quantum computers was motivated modeling its dynamics is the key to resolving a num- by their ability to simulate dynamical processes that are ber of physical phenomena, such as the fast-scrambling challenging for classical computation [1]. However, while conjecture for black holes [9, 10], non-Fermi liquid be- the size of the Hilbert space scales exponentially with the haviors [15, 16] and many-body localization [17]. Under- number of qubits, quantum dynamics can be simulated in standing scrambling also provides a basis for designing polynomial times when entanglement is insufficient [2{4] algorithms in quantum benchmarking or machine learn- or when they belong to special classes such as the Clif- ing that would benefit from efficient exploration of the arXiv:2101.08870v1 [quant-ph] 21 Jan 2021 ford group [5{7]. A physical process that fully lever- Hilbert space [18{20]. ages the computational power of quantum processors is A precise formulation of quantum scrambling is found quantum scrambling, which describes how interaction in in the Heisenberg picture, where quantum operators a quantum system disperses local information into its evolve and quantum states are stationary. Analogous to many degrees of freedom [8{12]. Quantum scrambling is classical chaos, scrambling manifests itself as a “butterfly the underlying mechanism for the thermalization of iso- effect”, wherein a local perturbation is rapidly amplified lated quantum systems [13, 14] and as such, accurately over time [11, 21]. More specifically, the perturbation is realized as an initially local operator (the “butterfly operator") O^, typically a Pauli operator acting on one ∗ These authors contributed equally of the qubits (the “butterfly qubit"). When the quan- y Corresponding author: [email protected] tum system undergoes a dynamical process U^, the butter- z Corresponding author: [email protected] fly operator O^ acquires a time-dependence and becomes x Corresponding author: [email protected] O^ (t) = U^ yO^U^, with U^ y being the inverse of U^. The 2 n ^ ^ P p ^ Cycle 1 Cycle 2 Cycle K resulting O (t) can be expanded as O (t) = i=1 wiBi, A CZ CZ ෝy B (i) (i) −1 Qa: |+Yۧ Q1 X V Y ^ where Bi =ρ ^1 ⊗ ρ^2 ⊗ ::: are basis operators consisting EG Q1: |+Xۧ EG (i) Q W−1 X V of single-qubit operatorsρ ^ acting on different qubits 2 j Q2: |+Xۧ EG −1 −1 and wi are their coefficients. † Q3 X W X Qb: |+Xۧ 푈 푈 EG EG Quantum scrambling is enabled by two different mech- Q Y X−1 Y−1 Q |+Xۧ N anisms: operator spreading and operator entanglement N 푈 [11, 22{26]. Operator spreading refers to the transfor- C Qa Q1 Q2 Q20 mation of basis operators such that on average, each ^ Bi involves a higher number of non-identity single-qubit 0.8 No Butterfly Operator 1.0 ഥ operators. Operator entanglement, on the other hand, 0.6 C , refers to the increase in np, i.e. the minimum number 0.4 0.5 ^ y of terms required to expand O (t). Independent char- ෝ 0.2 acterizations of these two mechanisms are essential for a 0.0 0.0 complete understanding of the nature of quantum scram- -0.2 OTOC Average bling. Quantifying the degree of operator entanglement -0.4 -0.5 also holds the key to assessing the classical simulation 0 5 10 15 20 0 5 10 15 20 complexity of quantum observables [27]. However, oper- Cycles Cycles ator spreading and operator entanglement are generally intertwined and indistinguishable in past experimental FIG. 1. OTOC measurement protocol. (A) Measurement studies of quantum scrambling [28{32]. scheme for the OTOC of a quantum circuit U^. A quantum In this Article, we perform a comprehensive characteri- system (qubits Q1 through QN ) is first initialized in a super- j=N zation of quantum scrambling in a two-dimensional (2D) position state Q j + Xi , where j + Xi = p1 (j0i + j1i) j=1 j j 2 j quantum system of 53 superconducting qubits. Signa- and j0i (j1i) is the ground (excited) state of individual qubits. tures of operator spreading and operator entanglement U^ and its inverse U^ y are then applied, with a butterfly oper- are clearly distinguished in our experiment. These re- ator (realized as an X gate on qubit Qb) inserted in-between. sults are enabled by quantum circuit designs that inde- An ancilla qubit Qa is initialized along the y-axis of the Bloch pendently tune the degree of each scrambling mechanism, sphere and entangled with Q1 by a pair of CZ gates. The as well as extensive error-mitigation techniques that al- y-axis projection of Qa, hσ^yi, is measured at the end. (B) ^ low us to faithfully recover coherent experimental signals The structure of U consists of K cycles: each cycle includesp ±1 in the presence of substantial noise. Lastly, we find that pone layerp of single-qubitp gates (randomly chosen from X , while operator spreading can be efficiently predicted by a Y ±1, W ±1 and V ±1) and one layer of two-qubit entan- gling gates (EG). Here W = Xp+Y and V = Xp−Y . (C) Left classical stochastic process, simulating the experimental 2 2 signature of operator entanglement is significantly more panel: The filled circles represent hσ^yi measured with Qb suc- costly with a computational resource that scales expo- cessively chosen from Q2 through QN . The open grey circles are a set of normalization values, corresponding to hσ^ i with- nentially with the size of the quantum circuit. y out applying the butterfly operator. The data are plotted over Our experiment approach is based on evaluating the ^ ^ different numbers of cycles in U and averaged over 60 random correlator between O (t) and a \measurement operator", circuit instances. Right panel: Experimental average OTOCs ^ M, which is another Pauli operator on a different qubit C for different Qb, obtained from dividing the corresponding (the \measurement qubit"): hσ^yi by the normalization values. C(t) = hO^y(t) M^ y O^(t) M^ i: (1) Here h:::i denotes the expectation value over a particular sufficient to identify operator spreading through the de- quantum state. C(t) is commonly known as the out-of- cay of C, whereas any insight into operator entanglement time-order correlator (OTOC) and related to the commu- necessitates an estimate of δC. tator [O^(t); M^ ] by C(t) = 1 − 1 hj[O^(t); M^ ]j2i [11, 21, 34{ The measurement protocol for OTOC is described in 2 ^ 37].