QOC — Quantum speed limits

Entanglement detection in dynamical quantum systems

2026-10-10T00:00:00Z

Quantum science and engineering increasingly target the exploitation and control of large-scale dynamical systems. As system size grows, novel phenomena and quantum advantages emerge, but the resulting many-body dynamics become correspondingly harder to monitor and characterize. In particular, the underlying Hamiltonian often lacks symmetries, and the induced many-body dynamics quickly become hard to track. Focusing on one of the most important quantum features---entanglement---we demonstrate that, for a broad class of common Hamiltonian models, one can design effective witnesses that detect both the presence and structure of entanglement over relatively long evolution times. Inspired by stabilizer-based simulation, we track the evolution of generalized stabilizers of the underlying state and use them to construct linear entanglement witnesses. Through numerical experiments on Heisenberg-type Hamiltonians with up to twelve qubits, we show that the required number of measurement settings can be kept at a modest scale as the system size increases, and entanglement detection remains effective over evolution times that significantly exceed those accessible to naive approaches. The corresponding calculations can be carried out largely symbolically. Furthermore, unlike accurate state simulation, the stabilizer-based design of entanglement witnesses can be performed in a much more coarse-grained, digitized manner. We hope these results will stimulate further exploration of the quantum control of large systems.

Generation of arbitrary quantum states in cavity-atom systems with a three-level ancilla

2026-09-26T00:00:00Z

We generalized the seminal work of Law & Eberly, and propose a protocol to generate arbitrary quantum states with a three-level atom as an ancilla in a more efficient manner. This protocol moves two excitations in parallel in each control step, thus reducing the number of evolution steps by half. Full analytical expressions for the control field strengths and timings are derived. The system dynamics is exposed to less chance of error accumulation in the timing and amplitudes of the control fields, and quantitative study in the context of the quantum speed limit is also considered.

Emergent Prethermal Symmetries for Scalable Hamiltonian Learning

2026-09-23T00:00:00Z

Learning an interacting many-body Hamiltonian at the Heisenberg limit generally requires control that preserves local information for evolution times of order $1/\varepsilon$ to attain $\varepsilon$ precision. To achieve this, existing protocols often rely on trusted many-qubit operations or increasingly rapid control pulses, creating a precision barrier when gates involve unknown multi-qubit interaction or have finite duration. We show that neither resource is necessary for geometrically local Hamiltonians. Our protocol applies only static single-qubit fields, whose strength is independent of system size and grows polylogarithmically with $1/\varepsilon$. These fields generate emergent prethermal symmetries that suppress thermalization for the entire learning experiment while retaining informative symmetry-preserving dynamics. On a $d$-dimensional lattice of $n$ qubits, this enables learning every coefficient to accuracy $\varepsilon$, with failure probability at most $δ$, using total evolution time $\mathcal{O}(\log^d(1/\varepsilon)\log^2(n/δ)/\varepsilon).$ Thus, our learning protocol attains the information-theoretically optimal $1/\varepsilon$ dependence up to polylogarithmic factors using product-state preparation, single-qubit measurements, and non-adaptive experiments. More broadly, our results establish emergent prethermal symmetries as a resource for quantum learning, opening a route to Heisenberg-limited characterization of many-body systems where fast or trusted many-qubit control is unavailable.

Procrastinating einselection in non-Markovian quantum dynamics

2026-09-17T00:00:00Z

Among the processes governed by open-system and dissipative quantum dynamics, environment-induced superselection, or einselection, is particularly foundational, since it describes the formation of a preferred set of pointer states through environmental monitoring and ultimately the emergence of classicality. Especially in the context of Quantum Darwinism, einselection can be studied in terms of the motion of an observable towards its pointer value. To this end, we derive a quantum speed limit for observables for finite-dimensional systems governed by differentiable time-local open dynamics. We identify two mechanisms through which non-Markovianity can enhance observable speed: direct dissipative motion supported by population retention or revival, and indirect enhancement through restoration of the asymmetry available for coherent motion. For permanent einselection, this delays the emergence of the pointer basis due to accumulated negativity.

A Square-Root Barrier to Quantum Gate Speed under Linear Coupling

2026-09-16T00:00:00Z

Faster quantum gates can suppress the decoherence accumulated during a computation, but in superconducting processors stronger microwave pulses can also increase leakage, off-resonant excitation, stray-field errors, and crosstalk. This creates a central energy--speed--error tradeoff: can quantum state engineering make a gate parametrically faster without paying proportionally more drive energy? We address this question by treating the driving pulse as a quantum bosonic field rather than a classical waveform. For a finite-dimensional system coupled linearly to that field, we prove that fixed-fidelity gate transition rates grow at most as the square root of the pulse energy, under stated uniformity conditions on the coupling and accepted dynamics. The bound permits arbitrary pulse states, including squeezed and non-Gaussian states, as well as drive--system entanglement and back action; coherent Gaussian pulses attain its energy exponent. Thus squeezing or other state engineering alone cannot replace the square-root energy law of a conventional linear drive by the linear scaling allowed by general quantum speed limits. Achieving that improvement requires changing the interaction class, in addition to using a suitable nonclassical pulse, thereby identifying interaction nonlinearity as an essential resource for relaxing the practical gate-speed error tradeoff.

Quantum speed limits based on quantifiers of quantum-state texture

2026-09-08T00:00:00Z

Quantum speed limits impose intrinsic lower bounds on the shortest time scale for quantum system evolution. As an emerging paradigm in quantum resource theory, quantum-state texture has attracted research interest amid the rapid advancement of quantum theory. Herein, we investigate the interplay between quantum speed limits and quantum-state texture via several canonical quantifiers, including trace distance, state rugosity and Jensen-Shannon divergence. To demonstrate our findings, we analyze the minimum evolution time of physical systems subject to dephasing and dissipative dynamics. For the Jensen-Shannon divergence, we further explore nonunitary dynamics described by completely positive and trace-preserving maps, taking the amplitude damping channel as a typical example. In addition, we explore the tightness of these bounds in the considered dynamical models. Our results reveal that quantum speed limits derived from quantum-state texture capture the fundamental constraints on quantum evolutionary speed, with promising applications in quantum computing, quantum control and quantum metrology.