Although the laws of classical physics are deterministic, thermodynamics gives rise to an arrow of time through irreversible processes. In quantum mechanics the unitary nature of the time evolution makes it intrinsically reversible, however the question of how to revert an unknown time evolution nevertheless remains. Remarkably, there have been several recent demonstrations of protocols for reverting unknown unitaries in scenarios where even the interactions with the target system are unknown. The practical use of these universal rewinding protocols is limited by their probabilistic nature, raising the fundamental question of whether time-reversal could be performed deterministically. Here we show that quantum physics indeed allows for deterministic universal time-reversal by exploiting the non-commuting nature of quantum operators, and demonstrate a recursive protocol for two-level quantum systems with an arbitrarily high probability of success. Using a photonic platform we demonstrate our protocol, reverting the discrete time evolution of a polarization state with an average state fidelity of over 95%. Our protocol, requiring no knowledge of the quantum process to be rewound, is optimal in its running time, and brings quantum rewinding into a regime of practical relevance.

We present a universal mechanism that, acting on any target qubit, propagates it to the state it had T time units before the experiment started. This protocol works by setting the target on a superposition of flight paths, where it is acted on by uncharacterized, but repeatable, quantum operations. Independently of the effect of each of these individual operations on the target, the successful interference of the paths causes it to leap to its past state. We prove that, for generic interaction effects, the protocol will herald a successful rewinding with probability 1 after some finite number of steps.

We show that there exist non-relativistic scattering experiments which, if successful, freeze out, speed up or even reverse the free dynamics of any ensemble of quantum systems present in the scattering region. This ``time translation'' effect is universal, i.e., it is independent of the particular interaction between the scattering particles and the target systems, or the (possibly non-Hermitian) Hamiltonian governing the evolution of the latter. The protocols require careful preparation of the probes which are scattered, and success is heralded by projective measurements of these probes at the conclusion of the experiment. We fully characterize the possible time translations which we can effect on multiple target systems through a scattering protocol of fixed duration. The core results are: a) when the target is a single system, we can translate it backwards in time for an amount proportional to the experimental runtime; b) when $n$ targets are present in the scattering region, we can make a single system evolve $n$ times faster (backwards or forwards), at the cost of keeping the remaining $n-1$ systems stationary in time. For high $n$ our protocols therefore allow one to map, in short experimental time, a system to the state it would have reached with a very long unperturbed evolution in either positive or negative time.

Coherent superpositions are one of the hallmarks of quantum mechanics and are vital for any quantum mechanical device to outperform the classically achievable. Generically, superpositions are verified in interference experiments, but despite their longstanding central role, we know very little about how to extract the number of coherently superposed amplitudes from a general interference pattern. A fundamental issue is that performing a phase-sensitive measurement is as challenging as creating a coherent superposition so that assuming a perfectly implemented measurement for verification of quantum coherence is hard to justify. In order to overcome this issue, we construct a coherence certifier derived from simple statistical properties of an interference pattern, such that any imperfection in the measurement can never overestimate the number of coherently superposed amplitudes. We numerically test how robust this measure is to underestimating the coherence in the case of imperfect state preparation or measurement and find it to be very resilient in both cases.

This corrects the article DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.124.200502.

One of the most widespread methods to determine if a quantum state is entangled, or to quantify its entanglement dimensionality, is by measuring its fidelity with respect to a pure state. In this Letter, we find a large class of states whose entanglement cannot be detected in this manner; we call them unfaithful. We find that unfaithful states are ubiquitous in information theory. For small dimensions, we check numerically that most bipartite states are both entangled and unfaithful. Similarly, numerical searches in low dimensions show that most pure entangled states remain entangled but become unfaithful when a certain amount of white noise is added. We also find that faithfulness can be self-activated, i.e., there exist instances of unfaithful states whose tensor powers are faithful. To explore how the fidelity approach limits the quantification of entanglement dimensionality, we generalize the notion of an unfaithful state to that of a D unfaithful state, one that cannot be certified as D-dimensionally entangled by measuring its fidelity with respect to a pure state. For describing such states, we additionally introduce a hierarchy of semidefinite programming relaxations that fully characterizes the set of states of Schmidt rank at most D.

Harnessing the flow of proper time of arbitrary external systems over which we exert little or no control has been a recurring theme in both science and science-fiction. Unfortunately, all relativistic schemes to achieve this effect beyond mere time dilation are utterly unrealistic. In this work, we find that there exist non-relativistic scattering experiments which, if successful, freeze out, speed up or even reverse the free dynamics of any ensemble of quantum systems present in the scattering region. This "time warping" effect is universal, i.e., it is independent of the particular interaction between the scattering particles and the target systems, or the (possibly non-Hermitian) Hamiltonian governing the evolution of the latter. The protocols require careful preparation of the probes which are scattered, and success is heralded by projective measurements of these probes at the conclusion of the experiment. We fully characterize the possible time translations which we can effect on $n$ target systems through a scattering protocol of fixed duration; the core result is that time can be freely distributed between the systems, and reversed at a small cost. For high $n$, our protocols allow one to quickly send a single system to its far future or past.

We introduce a method to speed up adiabatic protocols for creating entanglement between two qubits dispersively coupled to a transmission line, while keeping fidelities high and maintaining robustness to control errors. The method takes genuinely adiabatic sweeps, ranging from a simple Landau-Zener drive to boundary cancellation methods and local adiabatic drivings, and adds fast oscillations to speed up the protocol while canceling unwanted transitions. We compare our protocol with existing adiabatic methods in a state-of-the-art parameter range and show substantial gains. Numerical simulations emphasize that this strategy is efficient also beyond the rotating-wave approximation and that the method is robust against random static biases in the control parameters and with respect to damping and decoherence effects.

We propose a method to produce fast transitionless dynamics for finite-dimensional quantum systems without requiring additional Hamiltonian components not included in the initial control setup, remaining close to the true adiabatic path at all times. The strategy is based on the introduction of an effective counterdiabatic scheme: a correcting Hamiltonian is constructed which approximatively cancels nonadiabatic effects, inducing an evolution tracking the adiabatic states closely. This can be absorbed into the initial Hamiltonian by adding a fast oscillation in the control parameters. We show that a consistent speedup can be achieved without requiring strong control Hamiltonians, using it both as a stand-alone shortcut-to-adiabaticity and as a weak correcting field. A number of examples are treated, dealing with quantum state transfer in avoided-crossing problems and entanglement creation.

Quantum simulators, machines that can replicate the dynamics of quantum systems, are being built as useful devices and are seen as a stepping stone to universal quantum computers. A key difference between the two is that computers have the ability to perform the logic gates that make up algorithms. We propose a method for learning how to construct these gates efficiently by using the simulator to perform optimal control on itself. This bypasses two major problems of purely classical approaches to the control problem: the need to have an accurate model of the system, and a classical computer more powerful than the quantum one to carry out the required simulations. Strong evidence that the scheme scales polynomially in the number of qubits, for systems of up to 9 qubits with Ising interactions, is presented from numerical simulations carried out in different topologies. This suggests that this in situ approach is a practical way of upgrading quantum simulators to computers.

We investigate the problem of what evolutions an open quantum system described by a time-local Master equation can undergo with universal coherent controls. A series of conditions are given which exclude channels from being reachable by any unitary controls, assuming that the coupling to the environment is not being modified. These conditions primarily arise by defining decay rates for the generator of the dynamics of the open system, and then showing that controlling the system can only make these rates more isotropic. This forms a series of constraints on the shape and non-unitality of allowed evolutions, as well as an expression for the time required to reach a given goal. We give numerical examples of the usefulness of these criteria, and explore some similarities they have with quantum thermodynamics.

The simulation of quantum systems has been a key aim of quantum technologies for decades, and generalization to open systems is necessary to include physically realistic systems. We introduce an approach for quantum simulations of open system dynamics in terms of an environment of minimal size and a time-dependent Hamiltonian. This enables the implementation of a continuous-time simulation with a finite environment, whereas state-of-the-art methods require an infinite environment or only match the simulation at discrete times. We find the necessary and sufficient conditions for this Hamiltonian to be well behaved, and when these are not met, we show that there exists an approximate Hamiltonian that is well behaved and look into its applications.