Publication #1 - Relativistic Quantum Information Forum

Multi-time quantum process tomography on a superconducting qubit

Christina_giarmatzi — Thu, 22 Jan 2026 00:25:26 +0000

Current quantum technologies are at the cusp of becoming useful, but still face formidable obstacles such as noise. Noise severely limits the ability to scale quantum devices to the point that they would offer an advantage over classical devices. To understand the sources of noise it is necessary to fully characterise the quantum processes occurring across many time steps; only this would reveal any time-correlated noise called non-Markovian. Previous efforts have attempted such a characterisation but obtained only a limited reconstruction of such multi-time processes. In this work, we fully characterise a multi-time quantum process on superconducting hardware using in-house and cloud-based quantum processors. We achieve this by employing sequential measure-and-prepare operations combined with post-processing. Employing a recently developed formalism for multi-time processes, we detect general multi-time correlated noise. We also detect quantum correlated noise which demonstrates that part of the noise originates from quantum sources, such as physically nearby qubits on the chip.

Multi-Time Quantum Process Tomography On A Superconducting Qubit, Christina Giarmatzi, Tyler Jones, Alexei Gilchrist, Prasanna Pakkiam, Arkady Fedorov, Fabio Costa, Quantum 9, 1952 (2025). https://quantum-journal.org/papers/q-2025-12-18-1952/

Operational Models of Temperature Superpositions

CarolynWood — Mon, 08 Dec 2025 05:15:59 +0000

Dear colleagues, I'd like to draw your attention to our recent publication, which touches on topics relevant to the RQI community. Please find the abstract below:

An interacting quantum system and thermal bath can reach thermal equilibrium, resulting in the system and bath acquiring the same temperature. But how does a delocalized quantum system thermalize with a bath whose local temperature varies as, for example, in the Tolman effect? Here, we formulate two scenarios in which the notion of a “superposition of temperatures” may arise: first, a probe interaction with two different baths dependent on the state of another quantum system (a control); and second, a probe interaction with a single bath whose purified state is a superposition of states that each correspond to different temperatures. We show that the two scenarios are fundamentally different and can be operationally distinguished. Moreover, we show that the final probe state is sensitive to the specific realization of the thermalizing channels, and that our results hold for partial and prethermalization cases. Our models may be applied to scenarios involving joint quantum and relativistic phenomena, and explain some recent results found in quantum interference of relativistic probes thermalizing with Unruh or Hawking radiation.