How To Track Qubits Through Space and Time (Or: Sailing in a Quantum Boat)
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Quantum Physics arXiv:2605.30732 (quant-ph) [Submitted on 29 May 2026] Title:How To Track Qubits Through Space and Time (Or: Sailing in a Quantum Boat) Authors:James Bartusek, Zikuan Huang, Leo Orshansky, Henry Yuen View a PDF of the paper titled How To Track Qubits Through Space and Time (Or: Sailing in a Quantum Boat), by James Bartusek and Zikuan Huang and Leo Orshansky and Henry Yuen View PDF Abstract:While quantum position verification aims to certify a prover's location using quantum information, existing security definitions only guarantee that part of the successful adversarial party is in the claimed location. This leaves open the possibility that a distributed team of adversaries can jointly simulate a prover in a way that defeats the intended meaning of ``being at a location'' in position-based cryptography. We introduce stronger notions of position verification that we call quantum localization, which requires that there is a specified, unclonable state at the verified spacetime point -- and that this state can be found nowhere else. We show that quantum localization leads naturally to a meaningful notion of trajectory verification, in which quantum information is verifiably tracked through space and time. We construct quantum localization and trajectory verification protocols using quantum anchor states, which generalize coset states from unclonable cryptography. The security of our schemes is proven in the classical oracle (i.e. ideal obfuscation) model, which can be heuristically instantiated in the plain model using post-quantum indistinguishability obfuscation. We also introduce and instantiate the concept of functionality localization, which guarantees that the adversary has the ability to compute a secret function at the verified spacetime point, and this function cannot be computed anywhere else. This raises the intriguing possibility of localizing computational capabilities in space and time. More broadly, we believe our notions of quantum localization and our feasibility results provide stronger foundations for position-based cryptography. Subjects: Quantum Physics (quant-ph); Cryptography and Security (cs.CR) Cite as: arXiv:2605.30732 [quant-ph] (or arXiv:2605.30732v1 [quant-ph] for this version) https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2605.30732 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration) Submission history From: Zikuan Huang [view email] [v1] Fri, 29 May 2026 01:51:11 UTC (2,023 KB) Full-text links: Access Paper: View a PDF of the paper titled How To Track Qubits Through Space and Time (Or: Sailing in a Quantum Boat), by James Bartusek and Zikuan Huang and Leo Orshansky and Henry YuenView PDFTeX Source view license Current browse context: quant-ph new | recent | 2026-05 Change to browse by: cs cs.CR References & Citations INSPIRE HEP NASA ADSGoogle Scholar Semantic Scholar export BibTeX citation Loading... BibTeX formatted citation × loading... Data provided by: Bookmark Bibliographic Tools Bibliographic and Citation Tools Bibliographic Explorer Toggle Bibliographic Explorer (What is the Explorer?) Connected Papers Toggle Connected Papers (What is Connected Papers?) Litmaps Toggle Litmaps (What is Litmaps?) scite.ai Toggle scite Smart Citations (What are Smart Citations?) Code, Data, Media Code, Data and Media Associated with this Article alphaXiv Toggle alphaXiv (What is alphaXiv?) Links to Code Toggle CatalyzeX Code Finder for Papers (What is CatalyzeX?) DagsHub Toggle DagsHub (What is DagsHub?) GotitPub Toggle Gotit.pub (What is GotitPub?) Huggingface Toggle Hugging Face (What is Huggingface?) ScienceCast Toggle ScienceCast (What is ScienceCast?) Demos Demos Replicate Toggle Replicate (What is Replicate?) Spaces Toggle Hugging Face Spaces (What is Spaces?) Spaces Toggle TXYZ.AI (What is TXYZ.AI?) Related Papers Recommenders and Search Tools Link to Influence Flower Influence Flower (What are Influence Flowers?) Core recommender toggle CORE Recommender (What is CORE?) Author Venue Institution Topic About arXivLabs arXivLabs: experimental projects with community collaborators arXivLabs is a framework that allows collaborators to develop and share new arXiv features directly on our website. Both individuals and organizations that work with arXivLabs have embraced and accepted our values of openness, community, excellence, and user data privacy. arXiv is committed to these values and only works with partners that adhere to them. Have an idea for a project that will add value for arXiv's community? Learn more about arXivLabs. Which authors of this paper are endorsers? | Disable MathJax (What is MathJax?)