Autonomous quantum machines and finite-sized clocks (Q1712561)

The article provides for an important contribution to quantum technologies, being of key interest to those researching on quantum technologies, in general, and for those researching in particular in quantum control, quantum robotics, quantum artificial intelligence and nanotechnology. The main focus of the article regards the possibility of building a fully quantum machine as an autonomous quantum device which interacts with its surroundings. In this way rather than an external control of a quantum device, one allows the system to operate without an external controller. In order to develop such a quantum device, the authors show that one needs to consider finite-dimensional clock, however, they highlight that finite clocks can only accurately record time at discrete intervals and, also, any attempt to use the clock for time measurement or using it as a control system disturbs the clock reducing its performance with use, the authors work overcomes these two points by working with a finite-sized quantum clock and showing that one can use such a clock in the context of autonomous quantum devices, in particular, they address how unitary operations and time-dependent interaction Hamiltonians which are externally controlled in current quantum computation can be turned into operations performed by an autonomous device, they also address the backreaction on the quantum clock and derive the analytic bounds on the errors developed in the clock and in the target system, showing that the disturbance in the quantum clock can be made exponentially small in the clock's dimension, so that backreaction on the quantum clock can be made negligible allowing for an operative development of an autonomous quantum machine which may work for a given length of time before becoming too degraded. The article is organized in two parts, the first is comprised of sections 1 to 6 which give a complete overview of the article's main work, with main conclusions provided in section 6. The second part of the article, from sections 7 onward, deal with the complete formal work and mathematical proofs supporting the authors findings. For researchers working in Quantum AI (QAI), quantum robotics and automata theory and even Quantum Artificial Life (QALife) this article is of key importance since it supplies for a foundational basis on which future work may be developed around quantum automation solutions, which can draw upon this article's main findings and proposal. The work is also of key importance for nanotechnology, in particular nanorobotics where quantum dynamics enter into play.