We show that information in quantum memory can be erased and recovered perfectly if it is necessary. That the final states of environment are completely determined by the initial states of the system allows that an easure operation can be realized by a swap operation between system and an ancilla. Therefore, the erased information can be recoverd. When there is an irreversible process, e.g. an irreversible operation or a decoherence process, in the erasure process, the information would be erased perpetually. We present that quantum erasure will also give heat dissipation in environment. And a classical limit of quantum erasure is given which coincides with Landauer's erasure principle.
ICFO-Institut de Ciencies Fotoniques, The Barcelona Institute of Science and Technology（ICFO-光子科学研究所，巴塞罗那科学技术研究院）；MajuLab, CNRS-UCA-SU-NUS-NTU International Joint Research Laboratory（MajuLab，法国国家科研中心-南法大学-首尔大学-新加坡国立大学-南洋理工大学国际联合实验室）；Centre for Quantum Technologies, National University of Singapore（新加坡国立大学量子技术中心）；ICREA - Institució Catalana de Recerca i Estudis Avançats（加泰罗尼亚高级研究学院）；Universidad de Buenos Aires, Instituto de Física de Buenos Aires (IFIBA), CONICET（布宜诺斯艾利斯大学，布宜诺斯艾利斯物理研究所，阿根廷国家科学研究委员会）
According to Landauer's principle, erasing one bit of information incurs a minimum energy cost. Recently, Vaccaro and Barnett (VB) explored information erasure within the context of generalized Gibbs ensembles and demonstrated that for energy-degenerate spin reservoirs, the cost of erasure can be solely in terms of a minimum amount of spin angular momentum and no energy. As opposed to the Landauer case, the cost of erasure in this case is associated with the discrete variable. Here we study the {\it discrete} fluctuations in this cost and the probability of violation of the VB bound. We also o…
We show that portions of an image written into a gradient echo memory can be individually retrieved or erased on demand, an important step towards processing a spatially multiplexed quantum signal. Targeted retrieval is achieved by locally addressing the transverse plane of the storage medium, a warm 85Rb vapor, with a far-detuned control beam. Spatially addressable erasure is similarly implemented by imaging a bright beam tuned near the 85Rb D1 line in order to scatter photons and induce decoherence. Under our experimental conditions atomic diffusion is shown to impose an upper bound on the e…
In thermodynamics one considers thermal systems and the maximization of entropy subject to the conservation of energy. A consequence is Landauer's erasure principle, which states that the erasure of 1 bit of information requires a minimum energy cost equal to $kT\ln(2)$ where $T$ is the temperature of a thermal reservoir used in the process and $k$ is Boltzmann's constant. Jaynes, however, argued that the maximum entropy principle could be applied to any number of conserved quantities which would suggest that information erasure may have alternative costs. Indeed we showed recently that by usi…
We devise a scheme that protects quantum coherent states of light from probabilistic losses, thus achieving the first continuous-variable quantum erasure-correcting code. If the occurrence of erasures can be probed, then the decoder enables, in principle, a perfect recovery of the original light states. Otherwise, if supplemented with postselection based on homodyne detection, this code can be turned into an efficient erasure-filtration scheme. The experimental feasibility of the proposed protocol is carefully addressed.
Landauer argued that the process of erasing the information stored in a memory device incurs an energy cost in the form of a minimum amount of mechanical work. We find, however, that this energy cost can be reduced to zero by paying a cost in angular momentum or any other conserved quantity. Erasing the memory of Maxwell's demon in this way implies that work can be extracted from a single thermal reservoir at a cost of angular momentum and an increase in total entropy. The implications of this for the second law of thermodynamics are assessed.
Landauer's erasure principle puts a fundamental constraint on the amount of work required to erase information using thermal reservoirs. Recently this bound was improved to include corrections for finite-sized thermal reservoirs. In conventional information-erasure schemes, conservation of energy plays a key role with the cost of erasure. However, it has been shown that erasure can be achieved through the manipulation of spin angular momentum rather than energy, using a reservoir composed of energy-degenerate spin particles under the constraint of the conservation of spin angular momentum, in …
The erasure of a bit of information encoded in a physical system is an irreversible operation bound to dissipate an amount of energy $Q = k_\text{B} T\ln 2$. As a result, work $W \geq Q$ has to be applied to the physical system to restore the erased information content. This limit, called Landauer limit, sets a minimal energy dissipation inherent to any classical computation. In the pursuit of the fastest and most efficient means of computation, the ultimate challenge is to produce a memory device executing an operation as close to this limit in the shortest time possible. Here, we use a cryst…
According to Landauer's principle, erasing a memory requires an average work of at least $kT\ln2$ per bit. Recent experiments have confirmed this prediction for a one-bit memory represented by a symmetric double-well potential. Here, we present an experimental study of erasure for a memory encoded in an asymmetric double-well potential. Using a feedback trap, we find that the average work to erase can be less than $kT\ln2$. Surprisingly, erasure protocols that differ subtly give measurably different values for the asymptotic work, a result we explain by showing that one protocol is symmetric w…
We consider two bottlenecks in quantum computing: limited memory size and noise caused by heat dissipation. Trying to optimize both, we investigate "on-the-go erasure" of quantum registers that are no longer needed for a given algorithm: freeing up auxiliary qubits as they stop being useful would facilitate the parallelization of computations. We study the minimal thermodynamic cost of erasure in these scenarios, applying results on the Landauer erasure of entangled quantum registers. For the class of algorithms solving the Abelian hidden subgroup problem, we find optimal on-the-go erasure pro…
Thermodynamics with multiple-conserved quantities offers a promising direction for designing novel devices. For example, Vaccaro and Barnett's [J. A. Vaccaro and S. M. Barnett, Proc. R. Soc. A 467, 1770 (2011); S. M. Barnett and J. A. Vaccaro, Entropy 15, 4956 (2013)] proposed information erasure scheme, where the cost of erasure is solely in terms of a conserved quantity other than energy, allows for new kinds of heat engines. In recent work, we studied the discrete fluctuations and average bounds of the erasure cost in spin angular momentum. Here we clarify the costs in terms of the spin equ…
There exist memoryless zero-capacity quantum channels that when used jointly result in the channel with positive capacity. This phenomenon is called superactivation. Making use of Parrondo's paradox, we exhibit examples of superactivation-like effect for the capacity of classical communication channels as well as quantum and private capacity of quantum channels with memory. There are several ingredients necessary for superactivation of quantum capacity to occur in memoryless case. The first one is the requirement for the quantum channels which are amenable for superactivation to come from two …
The notion of wave-particle duality may be quantified by the inequality V^2+K^2 <=1, relating interference fringe visibility V and path knowledge K. With a single-photon interferometer in which polarization is used to label the paths, we have investigated the relation for various situations, including pure, mixed, and partially-mixed input states. A quantum eraser scheme has been realized that recovers interference fringes even when no which-way information is available to erase.
We present a quantum error correction code which protects three quantum bits (qubits) of quantum information against one erasure, i.e., a single-qubit arbitrary error at a known position. To accomplish this, we encode the original state by distributing quantum information over six qubits which is the minimal number for the present task (see reference [1]). The encoding and error recovery operations for such a code are presented. It is noted that the present code is also a three-qubit quantum hidded information code over each qubit. In addition, an encoding scheme for hiding $n$-qubit quantum i…
It is known that quantum interference can disappear with the mere possibility of distinguishability without actually performing the act. We create such distinguishability in an unbalanced SU(1,1) interferometer and indeed observe no interference in the direct photodetection of the outputs. On the other hand, such distinguishability can be erased with a projective measurement. Here, we report a method of homodyne detection that can also recover interference effect. We find that it is the indistinguishability in amplitude measurement that leads to the recovery of interference, and the quantum na…
Investigating principles for storage of quantum information at finite temperature with minimal need for active error correction is an active area of research. We bear upon this question in two-dimensional holographic conformal field theories via the quantum null energy condition (QNEC) that we have shown earlier to implement the restrictions imposed by quantum thermodynamics on such many-body systems. We study an explicit encoding of a logical qubit into two similar chirally propagating excitations of finite von-Neumann entropy on a finite temperature background whose erasure can be implemente…
Constraints on recovering quantum information after erasure
Center for Quantum Information and Control, University of New Mexico（新墨西哥大学量子信息与控制中心）；Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of New Mexico（新墨西哥大学物理与天文系）；Cheriton School of Computer Science, University of Waterloo（滑铁卢大学切里顿计算机科学学院）；Applied and Computational Mathematics Division, National Institute of Standards and Technology（美国国家标准与技术研究院应用与计算数学部）；Department of Physics, University of Colorado（科罗拉多大学物理系）；Center for Theory of Quantum Matter, University of Colorado（科罗拉多大学量子物质理论中心）
Decoherence transforms a ballistic quantum walk into a diffusive classical random walk. After each step the environment measures the particle's path and the outside world gets to know the which-way information. The relation between the which-way information and the classicality of the spatial distribution is clearly visible in the multi-coin quantum walk in which the information about particle's path is encoded in the multi-coin degree of freedom. The more information is stored on the coins, the more classical and diffusive the spatial distribution is. Here, we propose a generalized version of…
Shanghai Jiao Tong University（上海交通大学）；The University of Hong Kong（香港大学）；Hefei National Laboratory（合肥国家实验室）；Shanghai Research Center for Quantum Sciences（上海量子科学研究中心）
The Index-Erasure problem is a quantum state generation problem that asks a quantum computer to prepare a uniform superposition over the image of an injective function given by an oracle. We prove a tight $Ω(\sqrt{n})$ lower bound on the quantum query complexity of the non-coherent case of the problem, where, in addition to preparing the required superposition, the algorithm is allowed to leave the ancillary memory in an arbitrary function-dependent state. This resolves an open question of Ambainis et al., who gave a tight bound for the coherent case, the case where the ancillary memory must r…
