Protecting Astronomical Interferometry through Quantum-Memory Scrambling

Abstract

Preserving the complex visibility of coherently captured starlight is essential for quantum-assisted long-baseline interferometry, because this nonlocal coherence carries the spatial information needed to form astronomical images. Yet finite memory lifetime and imperfect retrieval inevitably produce storage failures; when a failed cell is heralded, its erased subsystem can leak which-node information to the environment and dephase the stored coherence. Strict finite-dimensional (\(U(1)\)) covariance further forbids uniform exact correction of all single-memory erasures. We address this combined physical and symmetry-imposed limit using local number-conserving quantum scrambling, parameter-independent pattern-conditioned recovery, and a fixed Gottesman--Jennewein--Croke receiver. We prove a channel-to-Fisher-information stability theorem that converts approximate logical recovery into an operational guarantee on receiver-accessible information over compact visibility regions. All-pattern finite-size simulations show that scrambling redistributes erasure risk and suppresses high-leakage events, while a separate equal-budget comparison identifies a shallow design that outperforms the tested deeper and charge-sector Haar-random benchmarks at the prespecified operating point. A separate compilation resolves every nontrivial recovery branch into abstract nearest-neighbor number-conserving gates. Although the present low-rate design does not yet improve fixed-total-memory throughput, it establishes a blueprint for converting spare memory capacity into protection of astronomical coherence, opening a path toward higher-rate, erasure-resilient quantum telescope architectures.