Scalar ultralight dark matter (ULDM) is uniquely accessible to tabletop experiments such as clocks and interferometers, and its search has been the focus of a vast experimental effort. However, the scalar ULDM mass is not protected from radiative corrections, and the entirety of the parameter space within reach of experiments suffers from a severe naturalness problem. In this paper, we propose a new twin mechanism that protects the mass of the scalar ULDM. Our scalar ULDM is a pseudo-Nambu-Goldstone boson with quadratic couplings to the standard model (SM) and to a twin copy of the SM, with a mirror Z2 symmetry exchanging each SM particle with its twin. Due to the mirror symmetry, the leading-order mass correction is quadratic in the (tiny) coupling while the linear order is canceled. This opens up vast regions of parameter space for natural quadratically coupled ultralight dark matter, within the sensitivity of existing and future experiments.

Open-system descriptions are typically introduced by coupling a quantum system to an external environment. Here we show that a closed interacting many-body system can itself generate a controlled non-Markovian quantum channel acting on a reduced nonlinear qubit through finite-size corrections to a nonlinear mean-field limit. We demonstrate this using the Kitagawa-Ueda one-axis twisting model, H=χJ_z^2, a paradigmatic model of collective spin dynamics, spin squeezing, and two-component Bose-Einstein condensates. Although the large-N regime of this model has been extensively studied, the conventional fixed-χ scaling does not yield a nontrivial dynamical large-N limit. In this paper, we investigate a complementary large-N formulation obtained from the double limit N→∞ and χ→ O(g/N), where g is a coupling constant. We derive the leading finite-N corrections to this limit and show that they correspond to an emergent non-Markovian dephasing process, producing a Gaussian decay of the Bloch-vector coherence with characteristic timescale t_φ≥√(N)/(2g). Exact finite-N calculations demonstrate that this effective open-system description becomes quantitatively accurate for systems containing on the order of one hundred qubits. The resulting framework provides a microscopic realization of non-Markovian dephasing generated intrinsically by a closed many-body system and enables efficient simulation of collective quantum dynamics beyond unitary mean-field theory. These results link the long-studied phenomenon of phase diffusion in atomic ensembles and Bose-Einstein condensates to the growing effort to characterize non-Markovian, beyond-Lindblad noise in quantum computing hardware, providing a rare case in which such a noise channel is derived from microscopic dynamics rather than fit phenomenologically.

There is great interest in generating and controlling entanglement in Bose-Einstein condensates and similar ensembles for use in quantum computation, simulation, and sensing. One class of entangled states useful for enhanced metrology are spin-squeezed states of $N$ two-level atoms. After preparing a spin coherent state of width $1/\sqrt{N}$ centered at coordinates $( \theta, \phi) $ on the Bloch sphere, atomic interactions generate a nonlinear evolution that shears the state's probability density, stretching it to an ellipse and causing squeezing in a direction perpendicular to the major axis. Here we consider the same setup but in the $N \rightarrow \infty $ limit . This shrinks the initial coherent state to zero area. Large $N$ also suppresses two-particle entanglement and squeezing, as required by a monogamy bound. The torsion (1-axis twist) is still present, however, and the center of the large $N$ coherent state evolves as a qubit governed by a two-state Gross-Pitaevskii equation. The resulting nonlinearity is known to be a powerful resource in quantum computation. It can be used to implement single-input quantum state discrimination, an impossibility within linear one-particle quantum mechanics. We obtain a solution to the discrimination problem in terms of a Viviani curve on the Bloch sphere. We also consider an open-system variant containing both Bloch sphere torsion and dissipation. In this case it should be possible to generate two basins of attraction within the Bloch ball, having a shared boundary that can be used for a type of autonomous state discrimination. We explore these and other connections between spin squeezing in the large $N$ limit and nonlinear quantum gates, and argue that a two-component condensate is a promising platform for realizing a nonlinear qubit.

The dilaton, a pseudo-Nambu-Goldstone boson (pNGB) of broken scale invariance, is an appealing ultralight dark matter (DM) candidate. Its mass is protected by conformal invariance and it can be searched for in tabletop experiments. However, contrary to standard pNGBs of internal symmetries, the dilaton generically has a large non-derivative self-coupling, leading to radiative contributions to its mass of the order of its decay constant. Hence typical ultralight dilatons should also have sub-eV decay constants, which would incur significant deviations from standard DM behavior at structure formation times, in severe tension with observations. Therefore, a fine-tuning is required to generate a hierarchy between the mass and the decay constant. In this work, we consider whether supersymmetry (SUSY) can be used to protect this hierarchy from quantum corrections. To ensure an ultralight dilaton mass robust against realistic SUSY-breaking contributions, we must consider a novel dilaton stabilization mechanism. The observed DM abundance can be produced by the misalignment mechanism for dilaton masses ranging from 10-11 to 1 eV. Unfortunately, irreducible SUSY-breaking corrections due to gravity restrict the couplings between the dilaton and the Standard Model to be extremely small, beyond the reach of any current or proposed experiments. Our work demonstrates that constructing a consistent model of ultralight dilaton DM is quite involved.

Modeling non-Hermitian Hamiltonians is increasingly important in classical and quantum domains, especially when studying open systems, PT symmetry, and resonances. However, the quantum simulation of these models has been limited by the extensive resources necessary in iterative methods with exponentially small postselection success probability. Here we employ a fixed-depth variational circuit to circumvent these limitations, enabling simulation deep into the PT-broken regime surrounding an exceptional point. Quantum simulations are carried out using IBM superconducting qubits. The results underscore the potential for variational quantum circuits and machine learning to push the boundaries of quantum simulation, offering new methods for exploring quantum phenomena with near-term intermediate-scale quantum technology.

Nonlinear mean field dynamics enables quantum information processing operations that are impossible in linear one-particle quantum mechanics. In this approach, a register of bosonic qubits (such as neutral atoms or polaritons) is initialized into a symmetric product state vertical bar psi >(circle times n) through condensation, then subsequently controlled by varying the qubit-qubit interaction. An experimental implementation of quantum state discrimination, an important subroutine in quantum computation, with a toroidal Bose-Einstein condensate is proposed. The condensed bosons here are atoms, each in the same superposition of angular momenta 0 and h, encoding a qubit. A nice feature of the protocol is that only a readout of individual quantized circulation states (not superpositions) is required.

Any state r=（x,y,z） of a qubit,written in the Pauli basis and initialized in the pure state r=（0,0,1）,can be prepared by composing three quantum operations:two unitary rotation gates to reach a pure state r=（x~2+y~2+z~2） -1/2 ×（x,y,z） on the Bloch sphere,followed by a depolarization gate to decrease |r|.Here we discuss the complementary state-preparation protocol for qubits initialized at the center of the Bloch ball,r=0,based on increasing or amplifying |r| to its desired value,then rotating.Bloch vector amplification increases purity and decreases entropy.Amplification can be achieved with a linear Markovian completely positive trace-preserving（CPTP） channel by placing the channel’s fixed point away from r= 0,making it nonunital,but the resulting gate suffers from a critical slowing down as that fixed point is approached.Here we consider alternative designs based on linear and nonlinear Markovian PTP channels,which offer benefits relative to linear CPTP channels,namely fast Bloch vector amplification without deceleration.These gates simulate a reversal of the thermodynamic arrow of time for the qubit and would provide striking experimental demonstrations of non-CP dynamics.

We investigate models of nonlinear qubit evolution based on mappings to an $n$-qubit central spin model (CSM) in the large $n$ limit, where mean field theory is exact. Extending a theorem of Erd\"os and Schlein, we establish that the CSM is rigorously dual to a nonlinear qubit when $n \rightarrow \infty$. The duality supports a type of nonlinear quantum computation in systems, such as a condensate, where a large number of ancilla couple symmetrically to a "central" qubit. It also enables a gate-model implementation of nonlinear quantum simulation with a rigorous error bound. Two variants of the model, with and without coupling between ancilla, map to effective models with different nonlinearity and symmetry. The duality discussed here might also be interesting from a quantum foundations perspective. There has long been interest in whether quantum mechanics might possess some type of small, unobserved nonlinearity. If not, what is the principle prohibiting it? The duality implies that there is not a sharp distinction between universes evolving according to linear and nonlinear quantum mechanics: A one-qubit "universe" prepared in a pure state $| \varphi \rangle $ at the time of the big bang and symmetrically coupled to ancilla prepared in the same state, would appear to evolve nonlinearly for any finite time $t>0$ as long as there are exponentially many ancilla $n \gg {\rm exp}(O(t))$.

Models of nonlinear quantum computation based on deterministic positive trace-preserving (PTP) channels and evolution equations are investigated. The models are defined in any finite Hilbert space, but the main results are for dimension N=2$ N \! = \! 2$. For every normalizable linear or nonlinear positive map phi on bounded linear operators X, there is an associated normalized PTP channel phi(X)/tr[phi(X)]$ \phi (X) / {\rm tr}[\phi (X)]$. Normalized PTP channels include unitary mean field theories, such as the Gross-Pitaevskii equation for interacting bosons, as well as models of linear and nonlinear dissipation. They classify into four types, yielding three distinct forms of nonlinearity whose computational power are explored. In the qubit case, these channels support Bloch ball torsion and other distortions studied previously, where it has been shown that such nonlinearity can be used to increase the separation between a pair of close qubit states, suggesting an exponential speedup for state discrimination. Building on this idea, the authors argue that this operation can be made robust to noise by using dissipation to induce a bifurcation to a novel phase where a pair of attracting fixed points create an intrinsically fault-tolerant nonlinear state discriminator.

Nonlinear qubit master equations have recently been shown to exhibit rich dynamical phenomena such as period doubling, Hopf bifurcation, and strange attractors usually associated with classical nonlinear systems. Here we investigate nonlinear qubit models that support tunable Lorenz attractors. A Lorenz qubit could be realized experimentally by combining qubit torsion, generated by real or simulated mean field dynamics, with linear amplification and dissipation. This would extend engineered Lorenz systems to the quantum regime, allowing for their direct experimental study and possible application to quantum information processing.

There is great interest in using near-term quantum computers to simulate and study foundational problems in quantum mechanics and quantum information science, such as the scrambling measured by an out-of-time-ordered correlator (OTOC). Here we use an IBM Q processor, quantum error mitigation, and weaved Trotter simulation to study high-resolution operator spreading in a four-spin Ising model as a function of space, time, and integrability. Reaching four spins while retaining high circuit fidelity is made possible by the use of a physically motivated fixed-node variant of the OTOC, allowing scrambling to be estimated without overhead. We find clear signatures of a ballistic operator spreading in a chaotic regime, as well as operator localization in an integrable regime. The techniques developed and demonstrated here open up the possibility of using cloud-based quantum computers to study and visualize scrambling phenomena, as well as quantum information dynamics more generally.

It has been shown that the Metropolis algorithm can be implemented on quantum computers in a way that avoids the sign problem. However, flat histogram techniques are often preferred as they don't suffer from the same limitations that afflict Metropolis for problems of real-world interest and provide a host of other benefits. In particular, the Wang-Landau method is known for its efficiency and accuracy. In this work we design, implement, and validate a quantum algorithm for Wang-Landau sampling, greatly expanding the range of quantum many body problems solvable by Monte Carlo simulation.

Several techniques have been recently introduced to mitigate errors in near-term quantum computers without the overhead required by quantum error correcting codes. While most of the focus has been on gate errors, measurement errors are significantly larger than gate errors on some platforms. A widely used transition matrix error mitigation (TMEM) technique uses measured transition probabilities between initial and final classical states to correct subsequently measured data. However from a rigorous perspective, the noisy measurement should be calibrated with perfectly prepared initial states, and the presence of any state-preparation error corrupts the resulting mitigation. Here we develop a measurement error mitigation technique, a conditionally rigorous TMEM, that is not sensitive to state-preparation errors and thus avoids this limitation. We demonstrate the importance of the technique for high-precision measurement and for quantum foundations experiments by measuring Mermin polynomials on IBM Q superconducting qubits. An extension of the technique allows one to correct for both state-preparation and measurement (SPAM) errors in expectation values as well; we illustrate this by giving a protocol for fully SPAM-corrected quantum process tomography.

Readout errors are a significant source of noise for near term quantum computers. A variety of methods have been proposed to mitigate these errors using classical post processing. For a system with $n$ qubits, the entire readout error profile is specified by a $2^n\times 2^n$ matrix. Recent proposals to use sub-exponential approximations rely on small and/or short-ranged error correlations. In this paper, we introduce and demonstrate a methodology to categorize and quantify multiqubit readout error correlations. Two distinct types of error correlations are considered: sensitivity of the measurement of a given qubit to the state of nearby "spectator" qubits, and measurement operator covariances. We deploy this methodology on IBMQ quantum computers, finding that error correlations are indeed small compared to the single-qubit readout errors on IBMQ Melbourne (15 qubits) and IBMQ Manhattan (65 qubits), but that correlations on IBMQ Melbourne are long-ranged and do not decay with inter-qubit distance.

We explore the possibility of discovering the mirror baryons and electrons of the Mirror Twin Higgs model in direct detection experiments, in a scenario in which these particles constitute a subcomponent of the observed DM. We consider a framework in which the mirror fermions are sub-nano-charged, as a consequence of kinetic mixing between the photon and its mirror counterpart. We consider both nuclear recoil and electron recoil experiments. The event rates depend on the fraction of mirror DM that is ionized, and also on its distribution in the galaxy. Since mirror DM is dissipative, at the location of the Earth it may be in the form of a halo or may have collapsed into a disk, depending on the cooling rate. For a given mirror DM abundance we determine the expected event rates in direct detection experiments for the limiting cases of an ionized halo, an ionized disk, an atomic halo and an atomic disk. We find that by taking advantage of the complementarity of the different experiments, it may be possible to establish not just the multi-component nature of mirror dark matter, but also its distribution in the galaxy. In addition, a study of the recoil energies may be able to determine the masses and charges of the constituents of the mirror sector. By showing that the mass and charge of mirror helium are integer multiples of those of mirror hydrogen, these experiments have the potential to distinguish the mirror nature of the theory. We also carefully consider mirror plasma screening effects, showing that the capture of mirror dark matter particles in the Earth has at most a modest effect on direct detection signals.

Self-Destructing Dark Matter (SDDM) is a class of dark sector models in which the collision of a dark sector particle with the earth induces its prompt decay into Standard Model particles, generating unique signals at neutrino detectors. The inherent fragility of SDDM makes its survival from the early universe unlikely, implying a late time production mechanism. We present an efficient late time production mechanism for SDDM based on atomic rearrangement, the mechanism responsible for muon or anti-proton capture in hydrogen. In this model, an atomic rearrangement process occurs in our galaxy, converting dark atoms into highly excited bound states our SDDM candidates. While the resulting SDDM is only a small fraction of the dark matter flux, its striking self-destruction signals imply a significant discovery reach in the existing data from the Super-Kamiokande experiment.

State preparation and measurement (SPAM) errors limit the performance of near-term quantum computers and their potential for practical application. SPAM errors are partly correctable after a calibration step that requires, for a complete implementation on a register of $n$ qubits, $2^n$ additional measurements. Here we introduce an approximate but efficient method for multiqubit SPAM error characterization and mitigation requiring the classical processing of $2^n \! \times 2^n$ matrices, but only $O(4^k n^2)$ measurements, where $k=O(1)$ is the number of qubits in a correlation volume. We demonstrate and validate the technique using an IBM Q processor on registers of 4 and 8 superconducting qubits.

There is a tremendous interest in developing practical applications for noisy intermediate-scale quantum processors without the overhead required by full error correction. Near-term quantum information processing is especially challenging within the standard gate model, as algorithms quickly lose fidelity as the problem size and circuit depth grow. This has lead to a number of non-gate-model approaches such as analog quantum simulation and quantum annealing. These come with specific hardware requirements that are different than that of a universal gate-based quantum computer. We have previously proposed an approach called the single-excitation subspace (SES) method, which uses a complete graph of superconducting qubits with tunable coupling. Without error correction the SES method is not scalable, but it offers several algorithmic components with constant depth, which is highly desirable for near-term use. The challenge of the SES method is that it requires a physical qubit for every basis state in the computer’s Hilbert space. This imposes exponentially large resource costs for algorithms using registers of ancillary qubits, as each ancilla would double the required graph size. Here we show how to circumvent this doubling by leaving the SES and fusing it with a multi-ancilla Hilbert space. Specifically, we implement the tensor product of an SES register holding “data” with one or more ancilla qubits, which are able to independently control arbitrary n×n unitary operations on the data in a constant number of steps. This enables a hybrid form of quantum computation where fast SES operations are performed on the data, traditional logic gates and measurements are performed on the ancillas, and controlled-unitaries act between. As example applications, we give ancilla-assisted SES implementations of quantum phase estimation and the quantum linear system solver of Harrow, Hassidim, and Lloyd.

Currently available quantum hardware allows for small-scale implementations of quantum machine learning algorithms. Such experiments aid the search for applications of quantum computers by benchmarking the nearterm feasibility of candidate algorithms. Here we demonstrate the quantum learning of a two-qubit unitary by a sequence of three parameterized quantum circuits containing a total of 21 variational parameters. Moreover, we variationally diagonalize the unitary to learn its spectral decomposition, i.e., its eigenvalues and eigenvectors. We illustrate how this can be used as a subroutine to compress the depth of dynamical quantum simulations. One can view our implementation as a demonstration of entanglement-enhanced machine learning, as only a single (entangled) training data pair is required to learn a 4 x 4 unitary matrix.

Diesel engines produce disproportionate levels of emissions when the engine and after-treatment systems are operating at low temperatures. This situation arises most commonly when the vehicle is first started after overnight. To quantify emissions attributable to vehicle starts, a sizable collection of on-road commercial vehicle operating data is analyzed to identify start-up events and inspect associated emissions. Data was obtained from the National Renewable Energy Laboratory's (NREL's) Fleet DNA and from the Center for Environmental Research & Technology (CE-CERT). Included are 500 + diesel vehicles with more than 42,000 recorded days, drawn from 25 vocational categories across the United States. Analysis shows that vehicle behavior, in terms of engine cold- and warm-operation, starts per day, soak time, and warm-up duration, differs significantly between vehicle vocations. Also, weighting factors for cold- and hot-starts currently used in the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's Federal Test Procedure (FTP) for heavy-duty emissions certification accurately represent real-world operations. Although the FTP includes a comparable fraction of cold operation, the hot fraction is much shorter than real-world operation due to limited test duration. The investigation also revealed that real-world engines operate for a significant amount of time when the engine coolant is in the "hot-stabilized" region, but the selective catalytic reduction (SCR) temperature is below its effective operating temperature of 200 degrees C. Of the vehicles under investigation, almost 20% of their operational time is within this condition. Thus, novel approaches to raise and maintain SCR temperature are highly required to further reduce engine emissions.