We consider the decomposition of arbitrary isometries into a sequence of single-qubit and Controlled-not (C-not) gates. In many experimental architectures, the C-not gate is relatively 'expensive' and hence we aim to keep the number of these as low as possible. We derive a theoretical lower bound on the number of C-not gates required to decompose an arbitrary isometry from m to n qubits, and give three explicit gate decompositions that achieve this bound up to a factor of about two in the leading order. We also perform some bespoke optimizations for certain cases where m and n are small. In addition, we show how to apply our result for isometries to give a decomposition scheme for an arbitrary quantum operation via Stinespring's theorem, and derive a lower bound on the number of C-nots in this case too. These results will have an impact on experimental efforts to build a quantum computer, enabling them to go further with the same resources.

Out-of-time-ordered correlation functions (OTOC's) are presently being extensively debated as quantifiers of dynamical chaos in interacting quantum many-body systems. We argue that in quantum spin and fermionic systems, where all local operators are bounded, an OTOC of local observables is bounded as well and thus its exponential growth is merely transient. As a better measure of quantum chaos in such systems, we propose, and study, the density of the OTOC of extensive sums of local observables, which can exhibit indefinite growth in the thermodynamic limit. We demonstrate this for the kicked quantum Ising model by using large-scale numerical results and an analytic solution in the integrable regime. In a generic case, we observe the growth of the OTOC density to be linear in time. We prove that this density in general, locally interacting, non-integrable quantum spin and fermionic dynamical systems exhibits growth that is at most polynomial in time-a phenomenon, which we term weak quantum chaos. In the special case of the model being integrable and the observables under consideration quadratic, the OTOC density saturates to a plateau. arXiv:1701.09147v1 [cond-mat.stat-mech]

Complete information on the equilibrium behavior and dynamics of quantum field theory (QFT) is provided by multipoint correlation functions. However, their theoretical calculation is a challenging problem, even for exactly solvable models. This has recently become an experimentally relevant problem, due to progress in cold-atom experiments simulating QFT models and directly measuring higher order correlations. Here we compute correlation functions of the quantum sine-Gordon model, a prototype integrable model of central interest from both theoretical and experimental points of view. Building upon the so-called truncated conformal space approach, we numerically construct higher order correlations in a system of finite size in various physical states of experimental relevance, both in and out of equilibrium. We measure deviations from Gaussianity due to the presence of interaction and analyze their dependence on temperature, explaining the experimentally observed crossover between Gaussian and non-Gaussian regimes. We find that correlations of excited states are markedly different from the thermal case, which can be explained by the integrability of the system. We also study dynamics after a quench, observing the effects of the interaction on the time evolution of correlation functions, their spatial dependence, and their non-Gaussianity as measured by the kurtosis.

One of the manifestations of relativistic invariance in non-equilibrium quantum field theory is the "horizon effect" a.k.a. light-cone spreading of correlations: starting from an initially short-range correlated state, measurements of two observers at distant space-time points are expected to remain independent until their past light-cones overlap. Surprisingly, we find that in the presence of topological excitations correlations can develop outside of horizon and indeed even between infinitely distant points. We demonstrate this effect for a wide class of global quantum quenches to the sine-Gordon model. We point out that besides the maximum velocity bound implied by relativistic invariance, clustering of initial correlations is required to establish the "horizon effect". We show that quenches in the sine-Gordon model have an interesting property: despite the fact that the initial states have exponentially decaying correlations and cluster in terms of the bosonic fields, they violate the clustering condition for the soliton fields, which is argued to be related to the non-trivial field topology. The nonlinear dynamics governed by the solitons makes the clustering violation manifest also in correlations of the local bosonic fields after the quench.

We develop, based on Baxter's corner transfer matrices, a renormalizable numerically exact method for computation of the level density of the quasi-energy spectra of two-dimensional (2D) locally interacting many-body Floquet systems. We demonstrate its functionality exemplified by the kicked 2D quantum Ising model. Using the method, we are able to treat the system of arbitrarily large finite size (for example 10000 × 10000 lattice). We clearly demonstrate that the density of Floquet quasi-energy spectrum tends to a flat function in the thermodynamic limit for generic values of model parameters. However, contrary to the prediction of random matrices of the circular orthogonal ensemble, the decay rates of the Fourier coefficients of the Floquet level density exhibit rich and non-trivial dependence on the system's parameters. Remarkably, we find that the method is renormalizable and gives thermodynamically convergent results only in certain regions of the parameter space where the corner transfer matrices have effectively a finite rank for any system size. In the complementary regions, the corner transfer matrices effectively become of full rank and the method becomes non-renormalizable. This may indicate an interesting phase transition from an area-to volume-law of entanglement in the thermodynamic state of a Floquet system.