[HN Gopher] The Quantum Butterfly Effect
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       The Quantum Butterfly Effect
        
       Author : lr0
       Score  : 73 points
       Date   : 2024-08-15 05:46 UTC (4 days ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (discover.lanl.gov)
 (TXT) w3m dump (discover.lanl.gov)
        
       | thecrims0nchin wrote:
       | I'm used to articles like this having some citation, but this
       | doesn't seem to have any. I know about los Alamos lab but not
       | familiar with their writing, am I correct in assuming this is
       | pre-published findings?
        
         | eigenket wrote:
         | This is the relevant preprint
         | 
         | https://arxiv.org/abs/1903.02651
        
       | refibrillator wrote:
       | Paper (2020): https://arxiv.org/pdf/2003.07267
       | 
       | As a layperson I found the first page to be more succinct and
       | intuitive than the article.
       | 
       | > Let Alice have such a processor that implements fast
       | information scrambling during a reversible unitary evolution of
       | many interacting qubits. She applies this evolution to hide an
       | original state of one of her qubits, which we call the central
       | qubit. The other qubits are called the bath. To recover the
       | initial central qubit state, Alice can apply a time-reversed
       | protocol.
       | 
       | > Let Bob be an intruder who can measure the state of the central
       | qubit in any basis unknown to Alice. If her processor has already
       | scrambled the information, Alice is sure that Bob cannot get
       | anything useful. However, Bob's measurement changes the state of
       | the central qubit and also destroys all quantum correlations
       | between this qubit and the rest of the system.
       | 
       | > According to the no-hiding theorem, information of the central
       | qubit is completely transferred to the bath during the scrambling
       | process. However, Alice does not have knowledge of the bath state
       | at any time. How can she recover the useful information in this
       | case?
       | 
       | > In this Letter, we show that even after Bob's measurement,
       | Alice can recover her information by applying the time-reversed
       | protocol and performing a quantum state tomography with a limited
       | amount of effort. Moreover, reconstruction of the original qubit
       | will not be influenced by Bob's choice of the measurement axis
       | and the initial state of the bath.
       | 
       | > This effect cannot be explained with semiclassical intuition.
       | Indeed, classical chaotic evolution magnifies any state damage
       | exponentially quickly, which is known as the butterfly effect.
       | The quantum evolution, however, is linear. This explains why, in
       | our case, the uncontrolled damage to the state is not magnified
       | by the subsequent complex evolution.
        
         | whatshisface wrote:
         | I don't get how the no-hiding theorem implies that the
         | information will be preserved in the remaining qbits, if the
         | "environment" of the measurement is the _lab_ , not the
         | _available ancilla_.
        
         | altruios wrote:
         | Boiling this down further...
         | 
         | f(cQbit)=> bath = decompose(cQbit)
         | 
         | Bath now has information about the central Qbit stored in the
         | bath.
         | 
         | Any measurement of cQbit changes the state of cQbit and
         | destroys any correlation with the bath.
         | 
         | Regardless of the state of cQbit: you can rebuild the cQbit
         | with the information about cQbit stored in the bath.
         | 
         | f(bath)=> cQbit = compose(bath)
         | 
         | This effect seems trivial as I've explained it. So I assume I
         | got something wrong.
         | 
         | Is it just the process of restoring from the bath into the
         | cQbit that's complicated, or has a bunch of gotcha's? It seems
         | like the state of the cQbit is inconsequential if you can just
         | overwrite (:ah... the gotcha) it with the info from the bath.
        
           | martincmartin wrote:
           | How does this interact with the No Cloning Theorem?
           | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No-cloning_theorem
           | 
           | If you can rebuild the cQbit from just the bath, then there's
           | no information in cQbit, right?
        
             | altruios wrote:
             | I'm a layman here: so much salt to take with this.
             | 
             | I assume the factors that mitigate/negate the no-cloning
             | theorem are that the bath is not a qBit, but a collection,
             | that the state's are initially entangled. It could also be
             | that the initial state of the cQbit is known, instead of
             | unknown.
             | 
             | the no-broadcast-theorem is what covers mixed states
             | instead of pure states. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No-
             | broadcasting_theorem
             | 
             | ``` The theorem[1] also includes a converse: if two quantum
             | states do commute, there is a method for broadcasting them:
             | they must have a common basis of eigenstates diagonalizing
             | them simultaneously, and the map that clones every state of
             | this basis is a legitimate quantum operation, requiring
             | only physical resources independent of the input state to
             | implement--a completely positive map. A corollary is that
             | there is a physical process capable of broadcasting every
             | state in some set of quantum states if, and only if, every
             | pair of states in the set commutes. This broadcasting map,
             | which works in the commuting case, produces an overall
             | state in which the two copies are perfectly correlated in
             | their eigenbasis. ```
             | 
             | So it seems that there is some wiggle room, and
             | specifically when you start working with collections
             | instead of single qbits, things get weird.
             | 
             | But I'm a layman, and that was just a walk down wikipedia.
        
       | hggh wrote:
       | (2021)
        
       | hggh wrote:
       | https://web.archive.org/web/20240819024055/https://discover....
        
       | oezi wrote:
       | > "At the outset, it wasn't clear that quantum chaos would even
       | exist," says Yan. "The equations of quantum physics give no
       | immediate indication of it."
       | 
       | Aren't the Copenhagen interpretation and Heisenberg uncertainty
       | principle an immediate indication that Quantum systems can only
       | be chaotic?
        
         | sieste wrote:
         | I think they are referring to the mathematical definition of
         | "chaotic" (sensitivity to initial conditions, topological
         | mixing, dense periodic orbits) which some equations and
         | dynamical systems satisfy, but that was not immediately clear
         | for the governing equations of QM.
        
           | oezi wrote:
           | From this mathematical definition, the dense periodic orbits
           | seem very hard to be satisfiable in many natural systems
           | which aren't bound by gravity or some other form of locality.
        
             | sieste wrote:
             | the definition refers to periodic orbits in phase space.
        
         | Vox_Leone wrote:
         | >>Aren't the Copenhagen interpretation and Heisenberg
         | uncertainty principle an immediate indication that Quantum
         | systems can only be chaotic?
         | 
         | Quantum systems are not chaotic but intrinsically
         | indeterminate, insofar as the initial conditions of a system
         | have no relation to the observed state. Chaotic systems are
         | deterministic, and therefore classical. Quantum chaos tools
         | attempt to bridge the gap.
         | 
         | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_chaos
        
       | rbanffy wrote:
       | Interesting... feels like reality has an error-correction
       | mechanism, that perturbations small enough can be smoothed out at
       | a macroscopic scale.
        
         | dahart wrote:
         | That seems unsurprising, right? Probably all physics we
         | experience - light-surface interactions, surfaces at the atomic
         | scale, and waves in air and water - are all made entirely of
         | only small perturbations, but enough of them the result is
         | statistically stable.
         | 
         | The popular idea of the butterfly effect in weather has always
         | seemed suspect to me, due to the fact that air is a naturally
         | _damped_ system; a butterfly's influence on air drops over
         | distance, and likely falls off fast enough that the probability
         | it can affect something even a few miles away is below atomic
         | or quantum thresholds. The analogy between weather and simple
         | mathematical chaotic systems seems specious.
         | 
         | Looking around a little it seems like some physicists are
         | starting to agree, and believe Lorenz' observations based on
         | his weather modeling has more to do with the modeling and
         | limited numerics than reality: "the limited predictability
         | within the Lorenz 1969 model is explained by scale interactions
         | in one article[22] and by system ill-conditioning in another
         | more recent study.[25]"
         | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Butterfly_effect#Recent_debate...
        
         | phyalow wrote:
         | I feel like its just getting at the main ideas of
         | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statistical_mechanics (although I
         | am technically lay in this field).
        
       | spiritplumber wrote:
       | "Some days you're the simulation, some days you're the calamari."
       | (If you know you know)
        
       | K0balt wrote:
       | This seems a bit self referential, if viewed from a many worlds
       | interpretation.
       | 
       | The infinity of universes in which you can exist is reduced to a
       | lesser infinity by the reverse time travel, since you could only
       | have travelled backwards from universal states in which those
       | specific conditions still existed, ergo reality appears to the
       | traveller to be self healing.
       | 
       | That's one of the things about MWI that is irritating, even
       | though it still seems the most likely to me. It covers the
       | testing parameters so completely that it is impossible to test.
       | You always end up in a lesser infinity, but an infinity
       | nonetheless. What we need is a way to quantify randomness in such
       | a way that we might detect a change in the dimensions of
       | infinities or something, but that seems improbable at best.
        
         | layer8 wrote:
         | The issue with Copenhagen is that it doesn't describe when
         | precisely wave-function collapse actually happens, i.e., when
         | the physical process deviates from the Schrodinger equation. It
         | is not a proper theory in that sense. There are objective-
         | collapse theories that do, and therefore provide different
         | predictions from Many-Worlds (which simply says that the
         | Schrodinger equation always holds). We haven't come up with
         | experiments yet that could test those different predictions,
         | but we may in the future.
        
           | rbanffy wrote:
           | I remember reading somewhere wave function collapse would
           | have some energy signature and that someone failed to detect
           | it, indicating the many worlds interpretation could not be
           | ruled out.
        
             | Enginerrrd wrote:
             | The only thing I can think of that you might be thinking of
             | is that as far as I know, MWI really requires QM be
             | perfectly linear.
             | 
             | I'm not 100% sure, but wave function collapse might involve
             | some non-linearity somewhere, whichight also be detectable
             | in some fashion.
        
           | nessus42 wrote:
           | Bohm's Interpretation is experimentally indistinguishable
           | from MWI.
           | 
           | On the other hand, Bohm's interpretation seems pretty ad hoc.
           | And it also includes all of the other worlds that MWI has in
           | it via the pilot waves that continue to exist and propagate
           | forever. (The pilot waves never collapse.) It's just that
           | only one of those many worlds ends up being "real".
        
             | layer8 wrote:
             | Yes, Bohmian mechanics seems like MW with added
             | complications, all the "worlds" still exist. It's not clear
             | how it is ontologically different from MW, other than that
             | painting one of the worldlines green.
        
       | bigtimber wrote:
       | https://phys.org/news/2020-07-simulating-quantum-butterfly-e...
        
       | ninju wrote:
       | [2021]
        
       | mixtureoftakes wrote:
       | it was just deleted? Page not found
        
         | stronglikedan wrote:
         | nope. maybe hugged, but it's there now
        
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       (page generated 2024-08-19 23:01 UTC)