Quantum circuits with classical versus quantum control of causal order

TL;DR

This paper introduces and characterizes two new types of quantum circuits that generalize fixed causal order, enabling dynamic and coherent control of causal order, with implications for quantum information processing.

Contribution

It defines and fully characterizes quantum circuits with classical and quantum control of causal order, expanding understanding of supermaps beyond fixed causal structures.

Findings

Quantum circuits with classical control allow dynamic causal order.

Quantum control of causal order encompasses all known physically realizable indefinite causal order processes.

New examples of processes with combined dynamical and coherent control are identified.

Abstract

Quantum supermaps are transformations that map quantum operations to quantum operations. It is known that quantum supermaps which respect a definite, predefined causal order between their input operations correspond to fixed-order quantum circuits. A systematic understanding of the physical interpretation of more general types of quantum supermaps--in particular, those incompatible with a definite causal structure--is however lacking. Here we identify two new types of circuits that naturally generalise the fixed-order case and that likewise correspond to distinct classes of quantum supermaps, which we fully characterise. We first introduce "quantum circuits with classical control of causal order", in which the order of operations is still well-defined, but not necessarily fixed in advance: it can in particular be established dynamically, in a classically-controlled manner, as the circuit is being used. We then consider "quantum circuits with quantum control of causal order", in which the order of operations is controlled coherently. The supermaps described by these classes of circuits are physically realisable, and the latter encompasses all known examples of physically realisable processes with indefinite causal order, including the celebrated "quantum switch". Interestingly, it also contains new examples arising from the combination of dynamical and coherent control of causal order, and we detail explicitly one such process. Nevertheless, we show that quantum circuits with quantum control of causal order can only generate "causal" correlations, compatible with a well-defined causal order. We furthermore extend our considerations to probabilistic circuits that produce also classical outcomes, and we demonstrate by an example how our characterisations allow us to identify new advantages for quantum information processing tasks that could be demonstrated in practice.