Peter W. Shor’s research while affiliated with Massachusetts Institute of Technology and other places

Maximizing the amount of work harvested from an environment is important for a wide variety of biological and technological processes, from energy-harvesting processes such as photosynthesis to energy storage systems such as fuels and batteries. Here, we consider the maximization of free energy—and by extension, the maximum extractable work—that can be gained by a classical or quantum system that undergoes driving by its environment. We consider how the free energy gain depends on the initial state of the system while also accounting for the cost of preparing the system. We provide simple necessary and sufficient conditions for increasing the gain of free energy by varying the initial state. We also derive simple formulae that relate the free energy gained using the optimal initial state rather than another suboptimal initial state. Finally, we demonstrate that the problem of finding the optimal initial state may have two distinct regimes, one easy and one difficult, depending on the temperatures used for preparation and work extraction. We illustrate our results on a simple model of an information engine.

We introduce a representation of $[[n, k]]$ stabilizer codes as semi-bipartite graphs wherein k ``input'' nodes map to n ``output'' nodes, such that output nodes may connect to each other but input nodes may not. We prove that this graph representation is in bijection with tableaus and give an efficient compilation algorithm that transforms tableaus into graphs. We then show that this map is efficiently invertible, which gives a new universal recipe for code construction by way of finding graphs with sufficiently nice properties. The graph representation gives insight into both code construction and algorithms. To the former, we argue that graphs provide a flexible platform for building codes particularly at smaller (non-asymptotic) scales. We construct as examples constant-size codes, e.g. a $[[64, 6, 5]]$ code and a family of roughly $[[n, \frac{n}{\log n}, \log n]]$ codes. We also leverage graphs in a probabilistic analysis to extend the quantum Gilbert-Varshamov bound into a three-way distance-rate-weight tradeoff. To the latter, we show that key coding algorithms -- distance approximation, weight reduction, and decoding -- are unified as instances of a single optimization game on a graph. Moreover, key code properties such as distance, weight, and encoding circuit depth, are all controlled by the graph degree. We give efficient algorithms for producing simple encoding circuits whose depths scale as twice the degree and for implementing logical diagonal and certain Clifford gates with non-constant but reduced depth. Finally, we construct a simple efficient decoding algorithm and prove a performance guarantee for a certain class of graphs, including the roughly $[[n, \frac{n}{\log n}, \log n]]$ code. These results give evidence that graphs are generically useful for the study of stabilizer codes and their practical implementations.

Random classical codes have good error correcting properties, and yet they are notoriously hard to decode in practice. Despite many decades of extensive study, the fastest known algorithms still run in exponential time. The Learning Parity with Noise (LPN) problem, which can be seen as the task of decoding a random linear code in the presence of noise, has thus emerged as a prominent hardness assumption with numerous applications in both cryptography and learning theory. Is there a natural quantum analog of the LPN problem? In this work, we introduce the Learning Stabilizers with Noise (LSN) problem, the task of decoding a random stabilizer code in the presence of local depolarizing noise. We give both polynomial-time and exponential-time quantum algorithms for solving LSN in various depolarizing noise regimes, ranging from extremely low noise, to low constant noise rates, and even higher noise rates up to a threshold. Next, we provide concrete evidence that LSN is hard. First, we show that LSN includes LPN as a special case, which suggests that it is at least as hard as its classical counterpart. Second, we prove a worst-case to average-case reduction for variants of LSN. We then ask: what is the computational complexity of solving LSN? Because the task features quantum inputs, its complexity cannot be characterized by traditional complexity classes. Instead, we show that the LSN problem lies in a recently introduced (distributional and oracle) unitary synthesis class. Finally, we identify several applications of our LSN assumption, ranging from the construction of quantum bit commitment schemes to the computational limitations of learning from quantum data.

We introduce various measures of forward classical communication for bipartite quantum channels. Since a point-to-point channel is a special case of a bipartite channel, the measures reduce to measures of classical communication for point-to-point channels. As it turns out, these reduced measures have been reported in prior work of Wang et al . on bounding the classical capacity of a quantum channel. As applications, we show that the measures are upper bounds on the forward classical capacity of a bipartite channel. The reduced measures are upper bounds on the classical capacity of a point-to-point quantum channel assisted by a classical feedback channel. Some of the various measures can be computed by semi-definite programming.

We present a quantum compilation algorithm that maps Clifford encoders, an equivalence class of quantum circuits that arise universally in quantum error correction, into a representation in the ZX calculus. In particular, we develop a canonical form in the ZX calculus and prove canonicity as well as efficient reducibility of any Clifford encoder into the canonical form. The diagrams produced by our compiler explicitly visualize information propagation and entanglement structure of the encoder, revealing properties that may be obscured in the circuit or stabilizer-tableau representation.

I recount some of my memories of the early development of quantum computation, including the discovery of the factoring algorithm, of error correcting codes, and of fault tolerance.

Publicly verifiable quantum money is a protocol for the preparation of quantum states that can be efficiently verified by any party for authenticity but is computationally infeasible to counterfeit. We develop a cryptographic scheme for publicly verifiable quantum money based on Gaussian superpositions over random lattices. We introduce a verification-of-authenticity procedure based on the lattice discrete Fourier transform, and subsequently prove the unforgeability of our quantum money under the hardness of the short vector problem from lattice-based cryptography.

We study scenarios which arise when two spatially-separated observers, Alice and Bob, are try to identify a quantum state sampled from several possibilities. In particular, we examine their strategies for maximizing both the probability of guessing their state correctly as well as their information gain about it. It is known that there are scenarios where allowing Alice and Bob to use LOCC offers an improvement over the case where they must make their measurements simultaneously. Similarly, Alice and Bob can sometimes improve their outcomes if they have access to a Bell pair. We show how LOCC allows Alice and Bob to distinguish between two product states optimally and find that a LOCC is almost always more helpful than a Bell pair for distinguishing product states.

The out-of-time-ordered correlation (OTOC) and entanglement are two physically motivated and widely used probes of the “scrambling” of quantum information, a phenomenon that has drawn great interest recently in quantum gravity and many-body physics. We argue that the corresponding notions of scrambling can be fundamentally different, by proving an asymptotic separation between the time scales of the saturation of OTOC and that of entanglement entropy in a random quantum-circuit model defined on graphs with a tight bottleneck, such as tree graphs. Our result counters the intuition that a random quantum circuit mixes in time proportional to the diameter of the underlying graph of interactions. It also provides a more rigorous justification for an argument in our previous work [Shor P.W., Scrambling time and causal structure of the photon sphere of a Schwarzschild black hole, arXiv:1807.04363 (2018)], that black holes may be slow information scramblers, which in turn relates to the black-hole information problem. The bounds we obtain for OTOC are interesting in their own right in that they generalize previous studies of OTOC on lattices to the geometries on graphs in a rigorous and general fashion.