Physical Review Letters

“Structure and Classification of Matrix Product Quantum Channels”

We develop a framework for matrix product quantum channels, a one-dimensional tensor-network description of completely positive, trace-preserving maps. We focus on translation-invariant channels, generated by a single repeated tensor, that admit a local purification. We show that their purifying isometry can always be implemented by a constant-depth brickwork quantum circuit, implying that such channels generate only short-range correlations when applied on product states. In contrast to the unitary setting, where one-dimensional quantum cellular automata (in one-to-one correspondence with matrix product unitaries) carry a nontrivial index, we prove that all locally purified channels belong to a single phase, that is, they can be continuously deformed into one another. Then, we extend the framework to a broader class of translation-invariant channels capable of generating long-range entanglement and show that these remain deterministically implementable in constant depth using two rounds of measurements and feedforward.

Access to paper: https://journals.aps.org/prl/abstract/10.1103/4216-bgrp