Information Scrambling in Computationally Complex Quantum Circuits
Creators: name: Mi, Xiao
name: Roushan, Pedram
name: Quintana, Chris
name: Mandra, Salvatore
name: Marshall, Jeffrey
name: Neill, Charles
name: Arute, Frank
name: Arya, Kunal
name: Atalaya, Juan
name: Babbush, Ryan
name: Bardin, Joseph C.
name: Barends, Rami
name: Bengtsson, Andreas
name: Boixo, Sergio
name: Bourassa, Alexandre
name: Broughton, Michael
name: Buckley, Bob B.
name: Buell, David A.
name: Burkett, Brian
name: Bushnell, Nicholas
name: Chen, Zijun
name: Chiaro, Benjamin
name: Collins, Roberto
name: Courtney, William
name: Demura, Sean
name: Derk, Alan R.
name: Dunsworth, Andrew
name: Eppens, Daniel
name: Erickson, Catherine
name: Farhi, Edward
name: Fowler, Austin G.
name: Foxen, Brooks
name: Gidney, Craig
name: Giustina, Marissa
name: Gross, Jonathan A.
name: Harrigan, Matthew P.
name: Harrington, Sean D.
name: Hilton, Jeremy
name: Ho, Alan
name: Hong, Sabrina
name: Huang, Trent
name: Huggins, William J.
name: Ioffe, L. B.
name: Isakov, Sergei V.
name: Jeffrey, Evan
name: Jiang, Zhang
name: Jones, Cody
name: Kafri, Dvir
name: Kelly, Julian
name: Kim, Seon
name: Kitaev, Alexei
name: Klimov, Paul V.
name: Korotkov, Alexander N.
name: Kostritsa, Fedor
name: Landhuis, David
name: Laptev, Pavel
name: Lucero, Erik
name: Martin, Orion
name: McClean, Jarrod R.
name: McCourt, Trevor
name: McEwen, Matt
name: Megrant, Anthony
name: Miao, Kevin C.
name: Mohseni, Masoud
name: Mruczkiewicz, Wojciech
name: Mutus, Josh
name: Naaman, Ofer
name: Neeley, Matthew
name: Newman, Michael
name: Niu, Murphy Yuezhen
name: O'Brien, Thomas E.
name: Opremcak, Alex
name: Ostby, Eric
name: Pato, Balint
name: Petukhov, Andre
name: Redd, Nicholas
name: Rubin, Nicholas C.
name: Sank, Daniel
name: Satzinger, Kevin J.
name: Shvarts, Vladimir
name: Strain, Doug
name: Szalay, Marco
name: Trevithick, Matthew D.
name: Villalonga, Benjamin
name: White, Theodore
name: Yao, Z. Jamie
name: Yeh, Ping
name: Zalcman, Adam
name: Neven, Hartmut
name: Aleiner, Igor
name: Kechedzhi, Kostyantyn
name: Smelyanskiy, Vadim
name: Chen, Yu
Publisher: name: arXiv
Year: 2021
Subjects: subject: Quantum Physics (quant-ph)
subject: Strongly Correlated Electrons (cond-mat.str-el)
subject: High Energy Physics - Theory (hep-th)
subject: FOS: Physical sciences
subject: FOS: Physical sciences

description: Interaction in quantum systems can spread initially localized quantum information into the many degrees of freedom of the entire system. Understanding this process, known as quantum scrambling, is the key to resolving various conundrums in physics. Here, by measuring the time-dependent evolution and fluctuation of out-of-time-order correlators, we experimentally investigate the dynamics of quantum scrambling on a 53-qubit quantum processor. We engineer quantum circuits that distinguish the two mechanisms associated with quantum scrambling, operator spreading and operator entanglement, and experimentally observe their respective signatures. We show that while operator spreading is captured by an efficient classical model, operator entanglement requires exponentially scaled computational resources to simulate. These results open the path to studying complex and practically relevant physical observables with near-term quantum processors.