Simulating Black Holes with Superconducting Quantum Processors

Tremendous progress has been made over the past decade in quantum coherent devices based on superconducting tunneling junctions and resonators, resulting in the development of nascent quantum processors with of order 10-100 qubits of varying connectivity. Such devices, though not resilient to arbitrary errors, can nonetheless be controlled to execute shallow circuit-depth quantum algorithms designed to operate with only a few logical gate operations while taking advantage of parallel processing and available classical resources to minimize coherence requirements. These specialized processors can be used to conduct quantum simulation experiments where entanglement and other hallmarks of quantum mechanics can be used to efficiently explore the properties of highly correlated matter. I discuss here the use of superconducting qutrits and ternary quantum logic to mimic the properties of information scrambling believed to be characteristic of a black hole. Specifically, a unitary operation is constructed to maximally spread information, and a quantum state is teleported through a scrambling and unscrambling sequence to determine whether information deposited into a black hole can be retrieved by probing the radiation field that is emitted from it and is being collected by an external observer.