Abstract

Quantum information scrambling has attracted much attention amid the effort to reconcile the conflict between quantum-mechanical unitarity and the thermalization irreversibility in many-body systems. Here we propose an unconventional mechanism to generate quantum information scrambling through a high-complexity mapping from logical to physical degrees-of-freedom that hides the logical information into nonseparable many-body correlations. Corresponding to this mapping, we develop an algorithm to efficiently sample a Slater-determinant wave function and compute all physical observables in dynamics with a polynomial cost in system size. The system shows information scrambling in the quantum many-body Hilbert space characterized by the spreading of Hamming distance. At late time we find emergence of classical diffusion dynamics in this quantum many-body system. We establish that the operator mapping enabled growth in an out-of-time-order correlator exhibits exponential-scrambling behavior. The quantum information-hiding mapping approach may shed light on the understanding of fundamental connections among computational complexity, information scrambling, and quantum thermalization.

Publication Details
Publication Type
Journal Article
Year of Publication
2019
Volume
100
DOI
10.1103/PhysRevA.100.032309
Journal
Physical Review A
Contributors
Groups