Spacetime duality between sequential and measurement-feedback circuits

TL;DR

This paper reveals a spacetime duality between sequential unitary circuits and measurement-feedback circuits, enabling new methods for preparing and diagnosing long-range entangled quantum states with minimal qubit measurements.

Contribution

It establishes a duality between SU and MF circuits under spacetime rotation and applies this to prepare and analyze complex quantum states.

Findings

Spacetime duality maps linear-depth SU circuits to constant-depth MF circuits.

Duality enables measurement protocols for diagnosing long-range order.

Proposes experimental methods requiring few qubits for state property detection.

Abstract

Two prevalent approaches for preparing long-range entangled quantum states are (i) linear-depth sequential unitary (SU) circuits, which apply local unitary gates sequentially, and (ii) constant-depth measurement-feedback (MF) circuits, which employ mid-circuit measurements and conditional feedback based on measurement outcomes. Here, we establish that a broad class of SU and MF circuits are dual to each other under a spacetime rotation. We investigate this spacetime duality in the preparation of various long-range entangled states, including GHZ states, topologically ordered states, and fractal symmetry-breaking states. As an illustration, applying a spacetime rotation to a linear-depth SU circuit that implements a non-invertible Kramers-Wannier duality, originally used to prepare a 1D GHZ state, yields a constant-depth MF circuit that implements a $\mathbb{Z}_2$ symmetry gauging map, which equivalently prepares the GHZ state. Leveraging this duality, we further propose experimental protocols that require only a constant number of qubits to measure unconventional properties of 1D many-body states. These include (i) measurement of disorder operators, which diagnose the absence of spontaneous symmetry breaking, and (ii) postselection-free detection of measurement-induced long-range order, which emerges in certain symmetry-protected topological phases. We also show that measurement-induced long-range order provides a lower bound for strange correlators, which may be of independent interest.