Artist conception of information falling into a black hole. Researchers have implemented an experimental test for quantum scrambling, a chaotic shuffling of the information stored among a collection of quantum particles. The experiment was originally inspired by the physics of black holes. Quantum scrambling is one suggestion for how information can fall into a black hole and come out as random-looking radiation. Perhaps, the argument goes, it’s not random at all, and black holes are just excellent scramblers. (Credit E. Edwards/JQI)
Researchers at the Joint Quantum Institute have implemented an experimental test for quantum scrambling, a chaotic shuffling of the information stored among a collection of quantum particles. Their experiments on a group of seven atomic ions, reported in the March 7 issue of Nature, demonstrate a new way to distinguish between scrambling—which maintains the amount of information in a quantum system but mixes it up—and true information loss. The protocol may one day help verify the calculations of quantum computers, which harness the rules of quantum physics to process information in novel ways.
“In terms of the difficulty of quantum algorithms that have been run, we’re toward the top of that list,” says Kevin Landsman, a graduate student at JQI and the lead author of the new paper. “This is a very complicated experiment to run, and it takes a very high level of control.”
The research team, which includes JQI Fellow and UMD Distinguished University Professor Christopher Monroe and JQI Fellow Norbert Linke, performed their scrambling tests by carefully manipulating the quantum behavior of seven charged atomic ions using well-timed sequences of laser pulses. They found that they could correctly diagnose whether information had been scrambled throughout a system of seven atoms with about 80% accuracy.
“With scrambling, one particle’s information gets blended or spread out into the entire system,” Landsman says. “It seems lost, but it’s actually still hidden in the correlations between the different particles.”
Quantum scrambling is a bit like shuffling a fresh deck of cards. The cards are initially ordered in a sequence, ace through king, and the suits come one after another. Once it’s sufficiently shuffled, the deck looks mixed up, but—crucially—there’s a way to reverse that process. If you kept meticulous track of how each shuffle exchanged the cards, it would be simple (though tedious) to “unshuffle” the deck by repeating all those exchanges and swaps in reverse.
Quantum scrambling is similar in that it mixes up the information stored inside a set of atoms and can also be reversed, which is a key difference between scrambling and true, irreversible information loss. Landsman and colleagues used this fact to their advantage in the new test by scrambling up one set of atoms and performing a related scrambling operation on a second set. A mismatch between the two operations would indicate that the process was not scrambling, causing the final step of the method to fail…..more here