Witnessing objectivity on a quantum computer

Understanding the emergence of objectivity from the quantum realm has been a long standing issue strongly related to the quantum to classical crossover. Quantum Darwinism provides an answer, interpreting objectivity as consensus between independent observers. Quantum computers provide an interesting platform for such experimental investigation of quantum Darwinism, fulfilling their initial intended purpose as quantum simulators. Here we assess to what degree current NISQ devices can be used as experimental platforms in the field of quantum Darwinism. We do this by simulating an exactly solvable stochastic collision model, taking advantage of the analytical solution to benchmark the experimental results.

Roads to objectivity: Quantum Darwinism, Spectrum Broadcast Structures, and Strong quantum Darwinism – a review

The problem of objectivity, i.e. how to explain on quantum grounds the objective character of the macroscopic world, is one of the aspects of the celebrated quantum-to-classical transition. Initiated by W. H. Zurek and collaborators, this problem gained some attention recently with several approaches being developed. The aim of this work is to compare three of them: quantum Darwinism, Spectrum Broadcast Structures, and strong quantum Darwinism. The paper is concentrated on foundations, providing a synthetic analysis of how the three approaches realize the idea of objectivity and how they are related to each other. As a byproduct of this analysis, a proof of a generalized Spectrum Broadcast Structure theorem is presented. Recent quantum Darwinism experiments are also briefly discussed.

Many-Body Localization and the Emergence of Quantum Darwinism

Quantum Darwinism (QD) is the process responsible for the proliferation of redundant information in the environment of a quantum system that is being decohered. This enables independent observers to access separate environmental fragments and reach consensus about the system’s state. In this work, we study the effect of disorder in the emergence of QD and find that a highly disordered environment is greatly beneficial for it. By introducing the notion of lack of redundancy to quantify objectivity, we show that it behaves analogously to the entanglement entropy (EE) of the environmental eigenstate taken as an initial state. This allows us to estimate the many-body mobility edge by means of our Darwinistic measure, implicating the existence of a critical degree of disorder beyond which the degree of objectivity rises the larger the environment is. The latter hints the key role that disorder may play when the environment is of a thermodynamic size. At last, we show that a highly disordered evolution may reduce the spoiling of redundancy in the presence of intra-environment interactions.

Quantum Darwinism in a Composite System: Objectivity versus Classicality

We investigate the implications of quantum Darwinism in a composite quantum system with interacting constituents exhibiting a decoherence-free subspace. We consider a two-qubit system coupled to an N-qubit environment via a dephasing interaction. For excitation preserving interactions between the system qubits, an analytical expression for the dynamics is obtained. It demonstrates that part of the system Hilbert space redundantly proliferates its information to the environment, while the remaining subspace is decoupled and preserves clear non-classical signatures. For measurements performed on the system, we establish that a non-zero quantum discord is shared between the composite system and the environment, thus violating the conditions of strong Darwinism. However, due to the asymmetry of quantum discord, the information shared with the environment is completely classical for measurements performed on the environment. Our results imply a dichotomy between objectivity and classicality that emerges when considering composite systems.