Observation of the dynamics of an ergodic quantum protocol in a photonic realization

Abstract

Abstract Iterated quantum protocols with measurement-based selection lead to deterministic chaos for the evolving pure state representing an ensemble of qubits. Deterministic chaos for the pure quantum state may lead to ergodic evolution in the sense that initial states from any small area on the Bloch sphere will cover the whole sphere after a finite number of iterations. We realize two steps of an ergodic protocol in a photonic experiment, where initial qubit states are encoded in the polarization and path degrees of freedom of down-converted photons stemming from a parametric process. We numerically analyze the effect of noise on the time evolution and show that the protocol, described by a Lattès map, remains quasi-ergodic for any initial state if the initial noise is small. Tomographic reconstruction of the quantum states throughout the evolution is consistent with simulations and thus demonstrates ergodicity of the quantum dynamics.