Sound clocks and sonic relativity

Sound propagation within certain non-relativistic condensed matter models obeys a relativistic wave equation despite such systems admitting entirely non-relativistic descriptions. A natural question that arises upon consideration of this is, "do devices exist that will experience the relativity in these systems?" We describe a thought experiment in which 'acoustic observers' possess devices called sound clocks that can be connected to form chains. Careful investigation shows that appropriately constructed chains of stationary and moving sound clocks are perceived by observers on the other chain as undergoing the relativistic phenomena of length contraction and time dilation by the Lorentz factor, with c the speed of sound. Sound clocks within moving chains actually tick less frequently than stationary ones and must be separated by a shorter distance than when stationary to satisfy simultaneity conditions. Stationary sound clocks appear to be length contracted and time dilated to moving observers due to their misunderstanding of their own state of motion with respect to the laboratory. Observers restricted to using sound clocks describe a universe kinematically consistent with the theory of special relativity, despite the preferred frame of their universe in the laboratory. Such devices show promise in further probing analogue relativity models, for example in investigating phenomena that require careful consideration of the proper time elapsed for observers.Comment: (v2) consistent with published version; (v1) 15 pages, 9 figure

Flexible quantum circuits using scalable continuous-variable cluster states

We show that measurement-based quantum computation on scalable continuous-variable (CV) cluster states admits more quantum-circuit flexibility and compactness than similar protocols for standard square-lattice CV cluster states. This advantage is a direct result of the macronode structure of these states---that is, a lattice structure in which each graph node actually consists of several physical modes. These extra modes provide additional measurement degrees of freedom at each graph location, which can be used to manipulate the flow and processing of quantum information more robustly and with additional flexibility that is not available on an ordinary lattice.Comment: (v2) consistent with published version; (v1) 11 pages (9 figures

Simulating quantum effects of cosmological expansion using a static ion trap

We propose a new experimental testbed that uses ions in the collective ground state of a static trap for studying the analog of quantum-field effects in cosmological spacetimes, including the Gibbons-Hawking effect for a single detector in de Sitter spacetime, as well as the possibility of modeling inflationary structure formation and the entanglement signature of de Sitter spacetime. To date, proposals for using trapped ions in analog gravity experiments have simulated the effect of gravity on the field modes by directly manipulating the ions' motion. In contrast, by associating laboratory time with conformal time in the simulated universe, we can encode the full effect of curvature in the modulation of the laser used to couple the ions' vibrational motion and electronic states. This model simplifies the experimental requirements for modeling the analog of an expanding universe using trapped ions and enlarges the validity of the ion-trap analogy to a wide range of interesting cases.Comment: (v2) revisions based on referee comments, figure added for clarity; (v1) 17 pages, no figure

Weaving quantum optical frequency combs into continuous-variable hypercubic cluster states

Cluster states with higher-dimensional lattices that cannot be physically embedded in three-dimensional space have important theoretical interest in quantum computation and quantum simulation of topologically ordered condensed-matter systems. We present a simple, scalable, top-down method of entangling the quantum optical frequency comb into hypercubic-lattice continuous-variable cluster states of a size of about 10^4 quantum field modes, using existing technology. A hypercubic lattice of dimension D (linear, square, cubic, hypercubic, etc.) requires but D optical parametric oscillators with bichromatic pumps whose frequency splittings alone determine the lattice dimensionality and the number of copies of the state.Comment: 8 pages, 5 figures, submitted for publicatio

An efficient, concatenated, bosonic code for additive Gaussian noise

Bosonic codes offer noise resilience for quantum information processing. A common type of noise in this setting is additive Gaussian noise, and a long-standing open problem is to design a concatenated code that achieves the hashing bound for this noise channel. Here we achieve this goal using a Gottesman-Kitaev-Preskill (GKP) code to detect and discard error-prone qubits, concatenated with a quantum parity code to handle the residual errors. Our method employs a linear-time decoder and has applications in a wide range of quantum computation and communication scenarios.Comment: 7 pages, 3 figure

Noise analysis of single-qumode Gaussian operations using continuous-variable cluster states

We consider measurement-based quantum computation that uses scalable continuous-variable cluster states with a one-dimensional topology. The physical resource, known here as the dual-rail quantum wire, can be generated using temporally multiplexed offline squeezing and linear optics or by using a single optical parametric oscillator. We focus on an important class of quantum gates, specifically Gaussian unitaries that act on single modes, which gives universal quantum computation when supplemented with multi-mode operations and photon-counting measurements. The dual-rail wire supports two routes for applying single-qumode Gaussian unitaries: the first is to use traditional one-dimensional quantum-wire cluster-state measurement protocols. The second takes advantage of the dual-rail quantum wire in order to apply unitaries by measuring pairs of qumodes called macronodes. We analyze and compare these methods in terms of the suitability for implementing single-qumode Gaussian measurement-based quantum computation.Comment: 25 pages, 9 figures, more accessible to general audienc