Quantum contextuality with mixed states of 1D symmetry-protected topological order

TL;DR

This paper explores how mixed states of 1D symmetry-protected topological order can still demonstrate quantum advantage through contextuality games, even under noise, with implications for near-term quantum hardware.

Contribution

It introduces a method to measure quantum advantage in noisy mixed states using twisted SOP and symmetry expectations, demonstrating robustness up to a critical temperature.

Findings

Quantum advantage persists at nonzero temperatures in finite systems.

The quantum winning probability is bounded by the fidelity with the 1D cluster state.

The approach provides an operational benchmark for quantum hardware capabilities.

Abstract

Bell theorems of many-body nonlocality and contextuality serve as a benchmark for proving quantum advantage in that a quantum computer outperforms a classical computer for a certain problem. In practice, however, near-term quantum devices do not prepare perfectly pure states but rather mixed states produced from noisy channels. We investigate noisy quantum advantage by considering thermal mixed states of one-dimensional many-body systems with a symmetry-protected topological (SPT) order. In the pure-state (or zero-temperature) case, these states are known to be useful for measurement-based quantum computation, and to outperform classical computers in a many-body contextuality game, provided string order parameters (SOPs) of SPT are sufficiently large. Here, we show that quantum advantage in mixed states is measured by a combination of twisted SOP and symmetry representation expectation values. Using the minimally entangled typical thermal states algorithm, it is demonstrated that quantum advantage persists to a nonzero critical temperature for finite-sized instances of the many-body contextuality game. While this critical temperature goes to zero in the thermodynamic limit, it is relatively robust to system size, suggesting that these states remain useful for demonstrating genuine "quantumness" of noisy hardware in a scalable fashion. Finally, we show that the quantum winning probability is lower bounded by the global fidelity with the 1D cluster state, so that our contextuality game can provide an operational meaning to benchmark the capacity to create long-range order like SPT states in near-term experimental devices.