Quantum Computation and Information Seminar 

12/05/2016, 16:00 — 17:00 — Room V1.05, Civil Engineering Building, IST
Benedikt Richter, Physics of Information and Quantum Technologies Group - IT, IST - Universidade de Lisboa and ASC, LMU Munich

Universality of Black Hole Quantum Computing

By analyzing the key properties of black holes from the point of view of quantum information, we derive a model-independent picture of black hole quantum computing. It has been noticed that this picture exhibits striking similarities with quantum critical condensates, allowing the use of a common language to describe quantum computing in both systems. We analyze such quantum computing by allowing coupling to external modes, under the condition that the external influence must be soft-enough in order not to offset the basic properties of the system. We derive model-independent bounds on some crucial time-scales, such as the times of gate operation, decoherence, maximal entanglement and total scrambling. We show that for black hole type quantum computers all these time-scales are of the order of the black hole half-life time. Furthermore, we construct explicitly a set of Hamiltonians that generates a universal set of quantum gates for the black hole type computer. We find that the gates work at maximal energy efficiency. Furthermore, we establish a fundamental bound on the complexity of quantum circuits encoded on these systems, and characterize the unitary operations that are implementable. It becomes apparent that the computational power is very limited due to the fact that the black hole life-time is of the same order of the gate operation time. As a consequence, it is impossible to retrieve its information, within the life-time of a black hole, by externally coupling to the black hole qubits. However, we show that, in principle, coupling to some of the internal degrees of freedom allows acquiring knowledge about the micro-state. Still, due to the trivial complexity of operations that can be performed, there is no time advantage over the collection of Hawking radiation and subsequent decoding.