The Quantum Butterfly Noneffect

The Quantum Butterfly Noneffect

Nikolai Sinitsyn, Bin Yan 

The butterfly effect is well accepted in our everyday world, where classical physics describes systems above the atomic scale. But in the submicroscopic world where quantum mechanics reigns, different—and very strange—rules apply. Does the butterfly effect still hold true? If not, what happens instead?

To our surprise, we not only disproved the butterfly effect in a quantum system, but we also found a sort of no-butterfly effect, as if the system wants to protect the present.

Being strongly entangled in the quantum sense meant that the system initially had robust quantum correlations among its parts. Entangled qubits share various properties, such as polarization, and in some ways act as one. Even after changing the local information, purely quantum and global correlations across all the entangled qubits put guard rails on the quantum dynamics, guiding them to restore the damaged local variables. The longer and more complex the evolution is, the more quantum correlations it generates, so the better our predictions become, and the more robust the present.

You could say reality in quantum mechanics is self-healing.