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QUANTUM PHYSICS

Forbidden by symmetry

Nature Physics volume 18, pages 235–236 (2022)Cite this article

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The physics of large systems is often understood as the outcome of the local operations among its components. Now, it is shown that this picture may be incomplete in quantum systems whose interactions are constrained by symmetries.

In the practice of physics, we often look for universal principles that allow us to simplify our theoretical descriptions of phenomena. Two of them usually stand out. The first is locality: systems usually only interact appreciably with those in their immediate vicinity. This allows us to study large structures by looking at how their smaller components interact. The second is symmetry: physical systems, and the interactions between them, generally have important features that are preserved under certain transformations. This often allows us to identify redundancies in their descriptions. Writing in Nature Physics, Iman Marvian1 reports an unexpected tension between these two fundamental principles, that appears when considering the interactions between many small quantum systems.

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Fig. 1: Decomposition of global quantum operations into local quantum gates.

References

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics, Garching, Germany

    Álvaro M. Alhambra

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  1. Álvaro M. Alhambra
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Correspondence to Álvaro M. Alhambra.

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Alhambra, Á.M. Forbidden by symmetry. Nat. Phys. 18, 235–236 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41567-021-01483-x

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