Quantum Many-body Systems Research Articles

Probing molecular spectral functions and unconventional pairing using Raman spectroscopy

An impurity interacting with an ultracold Fermi gas can form either a polaron state or a dressed molecular state, the molaron, in which the impurity forms a bound state with one gas particle. This molaron state features rich physics, including a negative effective mass around unitarity and a first-order transition to the polaron state. However, these features have remained so far experimentally inaccessible. In this work we show theoretically how the molaron state can be directly prepared experimentally even in its excited states using Raman spectroscopy techniques. Initializing the system in the ultrastrong coupling limit, where the binding energy of the molaron is much larger than the Fermi energy, our protocol maps out the momentum-dependent spectral function of the molecule. Using a diagrammatic approach we furthermore show that the molecular spectral function serves as a direct precursor of the elusive Fulde-Ferell-Larkin-Ovchinnikov phase, which is realized for a finite density of fermionic impurity particles. Our results pave the way to a systematic understanding of how composite particles form in quantum many-body environments and provide a basis to develop new schemes for the observation of exotic phases of quantum many-body systems. Published by the American Physical Society 2024

A quantum inspired approach to learning dynamical laws from data—block-sparsity and gauge-mediated weight sharing

Recent years have witnessed an increased interest in recovering dynamical laws of complex systems in a largely data-driven fashion under meaningful hypotheses. In this work, we propose a scalable and numerically robust method for this task, utilizing efficient block-sparse tensor train representations of dynamical laws, inspired by similar approaches in quantum many-body systems. Low-rank tensor train representations have been previously derived for dynamical laws of one-dimensional systems. We extend this result to efficient representations of systems with K-mode interactions and controlled approximations of systems with decaying interactions. We further argue that natural structure assumptions on dynamical laws, such as bounded polynomial degrees, can be exploited in the form of block-sparse support patterns of tensor-train cores. Additional structural similarities between interactions of certain modes can be accounted for by weight sharing within the ansatz. To make use of these structure assumptions, we propose a novel optimization algorithm, block-sparsity restricted alternating least squares with gauge-mediated weight sharing. The algorithm is inspired by similar notions in machine learning and achieves a significant improvement in performance over previous approaches. We demonstrate the performance of the method numerically on three one-dimensional systems—the Fermi–Pasta–Ulam–Tsingou system, rotating magnetic dipoles and point particles interacting via modified Lennard–Jones potentials, observing a highly accurate and noise-robust recovery.

Time crystal embodies chimeralike state in periodically driven quantum spin system

Chimera states are a captivating occurrence in which a system composed of multiple interconnected elements exhibits a distinctive combination of synchronized and desynchronized behavior. The emergence of these states can be attributed to the complex interdependence between quantum entanglement and the delicate balance of interactions among system constituents. The emergence of discrete-time crystal (DTC) in typical many-body periodically driven systems occurs when there is a breaking of time translation symmetry. Coexisting coupled DTC and a ferromagnetic dynamically many-body localized (DMBL) phase at distinct regions have been investigated under the controlled spin rotational error of a disorder-free spin-1/2 chain for different types of spin-spin interactions. We contribute a novel approach for the emergence of the DTC-DMBL-chimeralike state, which is robust against external static fields in a periodically driven quantum many-body system.

A finite-time quantum Otto engine with tunnel coupled one-dimensional Bose gases

We undertake a theoretical study of a finite-time quantum Otto engine cycle driven by inter-particle interactions in a weakly interacting one-dimensional (1D) Bose gas in the quasicondensate regime. Utilizing a c-field approach, we simulate the entire Otto cycle, i.e. the two work strokes and the two equilibration strokes. More specifically, the interaction-induced work strokes are modelled by treating the working fluid as an isolated quantum many-body system undergoing unitary evolution. The equilibration strokes, on the other hand, are modelled by treating the working fluid as an open quantum system tunnel-coupled to another quasicondensate which acts as either the hot or cold reservoir, albeit of finite size. We find that, unlike a uniform 1D Bose gas, a harmonically trapped quasicondensate cannot operate purely as a heat engine; instead, the engine operation is enabled by additional chemical work performed on the working fluid, facilitated by the inflow of particles from the hot reservoir. The microscopic treatment of dynamics during equilibration strokes enables us to evaluate the characteristic operational time scales of this Otto thermochemical engine, crucial for characterizing its power output, without any ad hoc assumptions about typical thermalization timescales. We analyse the performance and quantify the figures of merit of the proposed Otto thermochemical engine, finding that it offers a favourable trade-off between efficiency and power output, particularly when the interaction-induced work strokes are implemented via a sudden quench. We further demonstrate that in the sudden quench regime, the engine operates with an efficiency close to the near-adiabatic (near maximum efficiency) limit, while concurrently achieving maximum power output.

Dynamics of charge fluctuations from asymmetric initial states

Conserved-charge densities are very special observables in quantum many-body systems as, by construction, they encode information about the dynamics. Therefore, their evolution is expected to be of much simpler interpretation than that of generic observables and to return universal information on the state of the system at any given time. Here, we study the dynamics of the fluctuations of conserved U(1) charges in systems that are prepared in charge-asymmetric initial states. We characterize the charge fluctuations in a given subsystem using the full-counting statistics of the truncated charge and the quantum entanglement between the subsystem and the rest resolved to the symmetry sectors of the charge. We show that, even though the initial states considered are homogeneous in space, the charge fluctuations generate an effective inhomogeneity due to the charge-asymmetric nature of the initial states. We use this observation to map the problem into that of charge fluctuations on inhomogeneous, charge-symmetric states and treat it using a recently developed space-time duality approach. Specializing the treatment to interacting integrable systems we combine the space-time duality approach with generalized hydrodynamics to find explicit predictions. Published by the American Physical Society 2024

Statistics of Local Level Spacings in Single- and Many-Body Quantum Chaos.

We introduce a notion of local level spacings and study their statistics within a random-matrix-theory approach. In the limit of infinite-dimensional random matrices, we determine universal sequences of mean local spacings and of their ratios which uniquely identify the global symmetries of a quantum system and its internal-chaotic or regular-dynamics. These findings, which offer a new framework to monitor single- and many-body quantum systems, are corroborated by numerical experiments performed for zeros of the Riemann zeta function, spectra of irrational rectangular billiards, and many-body spectra of the Sachdev-Ye-Kitaev Hamiltonians.

Hilbert Space Delocalization under Random Unitary Circuits.

The unitary dynamics of a quantum system initialized in a selected basis state yield, generically, a state that is a superposition of all the basis states. This process, associated with the quantum information scrambling and intimately tied to the resource theory of coherence, may be viewed as a gradual delocalization of the system's state in the Hilbert space. This work analyzes the Hilbert space delocalization under the dynamics of random quantum circuits, which serve as a minimal model of the chaotic dynamics of quantum many-body systems. We employ analytical methods based on the replica trick and Weingarten calculus to investigate the time evolution of the participation entropies which quantify the Hilbert space delocalization. We demonstrate that the participation entropies approach, up to a fixed accuracy, their long-time saturation value in times that scale logarithmically with the system size. Exact numerical simulations and tensor network techniques corroborate our findings.

Understanding dynamical phase transitions in a spinor Bose–Einstein condensate via quantum and semiclassical analyses

Phase transitions in nonequilibrium dynamics of quantum many-body system, known as dynamical phase transitions (DPTs), play an important role for understanding various dynamical phenomena observed in different branches of physics. In general, there are two types of DPTs, the first one is characterized by distinct evolutionary behaviors of a physical observable, while the second one is marked by the vanishing overlap between the time-evolved and initial states. Here, we focus on exploring such DPTs from both quantum and semiclassical perspectives in a spinor Bose–Einstein condensate (BEC), an ideal platform for investigating nonequilibrium dynamics. Utilizing the sudden quench process, we demonstrate that the system exhibits both types of DPTs as the control parameter is quenched through the critical value, referring to as the critical quenching. We show analytically how to determine the critical quenching via the semiclassical approach and carry out a detailed examination of both semiclassical and quantum signatures of DPTs. In particular, we reveal that the occurrence of DPTs is triggered by the separatrix in the underlying semiclassical system. Our findings offer deeper insights into the properties of DPTs and verify the usefulness of semiclassical analysis for studying DPTs in quantum systems with well-defined semiclassical limit.

Counting atypical black hole microstates from entanglement wedges

Disentangled black hole microstates are atypical states in holographic CFTs whose gravity duals do not have smooth horizons. If there exist sufficiently many disentangled microstates to account for the entire black hole entropy, then any black hole microstate can be written as a superposition of states without smooth horizons. We show that there exist sufficiently many disentangled microstates to account for almost the entire black hole entropy of a large AdS black hole at the semiclassical limit GN → 0. In addition, we also argue that in generic quantum many-body systems with short-ranged interactions, there exist sufficiently many area law states in the microcanonical subspace to account for almost the entire thermodynamic entropy in the standard thermodynamic limit. Area law states are atypical since a typical state should contain volume law entanglement. Furthermore, we also present an explicit way to construct such a set of area law states, and argue that the same construction may also be used to construct disentangled states.

Efficiency of neural-network state representations of one-dimensional quantum spin systems

Neural-network state representations of quantum many-body systems are attracting great attention and more rigorous quantitative analysis of their expressibility and complexity is warranted. Our analysis of the restricted Boltzmann machine (RBM) state representation of one-dimensional (1D) quantum spin systems provides new insight into their computational complexity. We define a class of long-range-fast-decay (LRFD) RBM states with quantifiable upper bounds on truncation errors and provide numerical evidence for a large class of 1D quantum systems that may be approximated by LRFD RBMs of at most polynomial complexities. These results lead us to conjecture that the ground states of a wide range of quantum systems may be exactly represented by LRFD RBMs or a variant of them, even in cases where other state representations become less efficient. At last, we provide the relations between multiple typical state manifolds. Our work proposes a paradigm for doing complexity analysis for generic long-range RBMs which naturally yields a further classification of this manifold. This paradigm and our characterization of their nonlocal structures may pave the way for understanding the natural measure of complexity for quantum many-body states described by RBMs and are generalizable for higher-dimensional systems and deep neural-network quantum states. Published by the American Physical Society 2024

Exactly solvable Hamiltonian fragments obtained from a direct sum of Lie algebras.

Exactly solvable Hamiltonians are useful in the study of quantum many-body systems using quantum computers. In the variational quantum eigensolver, a decomposition of the target Hamiltonian into exactly solvable fragments can be used for the evaluation of the energies via repeated quantum measurements. In this work, we apply more general classes of exactly solvable qubit Hamiltonians than previously considered to address the Hamiltonian measurement problem. The most general exactly solvable Hamiltonians we use are defined by the condition that within each simultaneous eigenspace of a set of Pauli symmetries, the Hamiltonian acts effectively as an element of a direct sum of so(N) Lie algebras and can, therefore, be measured using a combination of unitaries in the associated Lie group, Clifford unitaries, and mid-circuit measurements. The application of such Hamiltonians to decomposing molecular electronic Hamiltonians via graph partitioning techniques shows a reduction in the total number of measurements required to estimate the expectation value compared to previously used exactly solvable qubit Hamiltonians.

Measuring the Boundary Gapless State and Criticality via Disorder Operator.

The disorder operator is often designed to reveal the conformal field theory (CFT) information in quantum many-body systems. By using large-scale quantum MonteCarlo simulation, we study the scaling behavior of disorder operators on the boundary in the two-dimensional Heisenberg model on the square-octagon lattice with gapless topological edge state. In the Affleck-Kennedy-Lieb-Tasaki phase, the disorder operator is shown to hold the perimeter scaling with a logarithmic term associated with the Luttinger liquid parameter K. This effective Luttinger liquid parameter K reflects the low-energy physics and CFT for (1+1)D boundary. At bulk critical point, the effective K is suppressed but it keeps finite value, indicating the coupling between the gapless edge state and bulk fluctuation. The logarithmic term numerically captures this coupling picture, which reveals the (1+1)D SU(2)_{1} CFT and (2+1)D O(3) CFT at boundary criticality. Our Letter paves a new way to study the exotic boundary state and boundary criticality.

A Dyson Brownian Motion Model for Weak Measurements in Chaotic Quantum Systems

We consider a toy model for the study of monitored dynamics in many-body quantum systems. We study the stochastic Schrödinger equation resulting from continuous monitoring with a rate Γ of a random Hermitian operator, drawn from the Gaussian unitary ensemble (GUE) at every time t. Due to invariance by unitary transformations, the dynamics of the eigenvalues {λα}α=1n of the density matrix decouples from that of the eigenvectors, and is exactly described by stochastic equations that we derive. We consider two regimes: in the presence of an extra dephasing term, which can be generated by imperfect quantum measurements, the density matrix has a stationary distribution, and we show that in the limit of large size n→∞ it matches with the inverse-Marchenko–Pastur distribution. In the case of perfect measurements, instead, purification eventually occurs and we focus on finite-time dynamics. In this case, remarkably, we find an exact solution for the joint probability distribution of λ’s at each time t and for each size n. Two relevant regimes emerge: at short times tΓ=O(1), the spectrum is in a Coulomb gas regime, with a well-defined continuous spectral distribution in the n→∞ limit. In that case, all moments of the density matrix become self-averaging and it is possible to exactly characterize the entanglement spectrum. In the limit of large times tΓ=O(n), one enters instead a regime in which the eigenvalues are exponentially separated log(λα/λβ)=O(Γt/n), but fluctuations ∼O(Γt/n) play an essential role. We are still able to characterize the asymptotic behaviors of the entanglement entropy in this regime.

Wavefunction matching for solving quantum many-body problems

Ab initio calculations have an essential role in our fundamental understanding of quantum many-body systems across many subfields, from strongly correlated fermions1–3 to quantum chemistry4–6 and from atomic and molecular systems7–9 to nuclear physics10–14. One of the primary challenges is to perform accurate calculations for systems where the interactions may be complicated and difficult for the chosen computational method to handle. Here we address the problem by introducing an approach called wavefunction matching. Wavefunction matching transforms the interaction between particles so that the wavefunctions up to some finite range match that of an easily computable interaction. This allows for calculations of systems that would otherwise be impossible owing to problems such as Monte Carlo sign cancellations. We apply the method to lattice Monte Carlo simulations15,16 of light nuclei, medium-mass nuclei, neutron matter and nuclear matter. We use high-fidelity chiral effective field theory interactions17,18 and find good agreement with empirical data. These results are accompanied by insights on the nuclear interactions that may help to resolve long-standing challenges in accurately reproducing nuclear binding energies, charge radii and nuclear-matter saturation in ab initio calculations19,20.

Evidence for a finite-momentum Cooper pair in tricolor d-wave superconducting superlattices

Fermionic superfluidity with a nontrivial Cooper-pairing, beyond the conventional Bardeen-Cooper-Schrieffer state, is a captivating field of study in quantum many-body systems. In particular, the search for superconducting states with finite-momentum pairs has long been a challenge, but establishing its existence has long suffered from the lack of an appropriate probe to reveal its momentum. Recently, it has been proposed that the nonreciprocal electron transport is the most powerful probe for the finite-momentum pairs, because it directly couples to the supercurrents. Here we reveal such a pairing state by the non-reciprocal transport on tricolor superlattices with strong spin-orbit coupling combined with broken inversion-symmetry consisting of atomically thin d-wave superconductor CeCoIn5. We find that while the second-harmonic resistance exhibits a distinct dip anomaly at the low-temperature (T)/high-magnetic field (H) corner in the HT-plane for H applied to the antinodal direction of the d-wave gap, such an anomaly is absent for H along the nodal direction. By carefully isolating extrinsic effects due to vortex dynamics, we reveal the presence of a non-reciprocal response originating from intrinsic superconducting properties characterized by finite-momentum pairs. We attribute the high-field state to the helical superconducting state, wherein the phase of the order parameter is spontaneously spatially modulated.

Directly imaging spin polarons in a kinetically frustrated Hubbard system.

The emergence of quasiparticles in quantum many-body systems underlies the rich phenomenology in many strongly interacting materials. In the context of doped Mott insulators, magnetic polarons are quasiparticles that usually arise from an interplay between the kinetic energy of doped charge carriers and superexchange spin interactions1-8. However, in kinetically frustrated lattices, itinerant spin polarons-bound states of a dopant and a spin flip-have been theoretically predicted even in the absence of superexchange coupling9-14. Despite their important role in the theory of kinetic magnetism, a microscopic observation of these polarons is lacking. Here we directly image itinerant spin polarons in a triangular-lattice Hubbard system realized with ultracold atoms, revealing enhanced antiferromagnetic correlations in the local environment of a hole dopant. In contrast, around a charge dopant, we find ferromagnetic correlations, a manifestation of the elusive Nagaoka effect15,16. We study the evolution of these correlations with interactions and doping, and use higher-order correlation functions to further elucidate the relative contributions of superexchange and kinetic mechanisms. The robustness of itinerant spin polarons at high temperature paves the way for exploring potential mechanisms for hole pairing and superconductivity in frustrated systems10,11. Furthermore, our work provides microscopic insights into related phenomena in triangular-lattice moiré materials17-20.

Insulating-to-conducting state transition in the bilayer Hubbard model induced by a perpendicular quench field

A many-body quantum system with varying parameters can exhibit two distinct quantum states within the same energy shell. This allows for a dynamic transition from the ground state of the pre-quench Hamiltonian to a steady state of the post-quench Hamiltonian. We investigate the dynamic response of the ground states in a two-layer half-filled Hubbard model to a perpendicular electric field. We demonstrate that the steady state exhibits conductivity when the field is in resonance with the on-site repulsion, while the initial state is a Mott-insulating state. Additionally, the two layers exhibit identical conducting behavior due to the formation of long-lived dopings, as evidenced by the charge fluctuation. The key factor in achieving this dynamic transition is the cooperative interplay between on-site interactions and the resonant field, rather than the individual roles they play. Our findings offer an alternative mechanism for field-induced conductivity in strongly correlated systems.

Separability criterion using one observable for special states: Entanglement detection via quantum quench

Detecting entanglement in many-body quantum systems is crucial but challenging, typically requiring multiple measurements. Here, we establish a class of states where measuring connected correlations in just basis gives a necessary condition to detect bipartite separability, thus offering a sufficient condition to detect entanglement, provided the appropriate basis and observables are chosen. This methodology leverages prior information about the state, which, although insufficient to reveal the complete state or its entanglement, enables our one basis approach to be effective. We discuss the possibility of one observable entanglement detection in a variety of systems, including those without conserved charges, such as the transverse Ising model, reaching the appropriate basis via quantum quench. This provides a much simpler pathway of detection than previous works. It also shows improved sensitivity from Pearson correlation detection techniques. Published by the American Physical Society 2024

Numerical investigations of the extensive entanglement Hamiltonian in quantum spin ladders

Entanglement constitutes one of the key concepts in quantum mechanics and serves as an indispensable tool in the understanding of quantum many-body systems. In this work, we perform extensive numerical investigations of extensive entanglement properties of coupled quantum spin chains. This setup has proven useful for e.g. extending the Lieb–Schultz–Mattis theorem to open systems, and contrasts the majority of previous research where the entanglement cut has one lower dimension than the system. We focus on the cases where the entanglement Hamiltonian is either gapless or exhibits spontaneous symmetry breaking behavior. We further employ conformal field theoretical formulae to identify the universal behavior in the former case. The results in our work can serve as a paradigmatic starting point for more systematic exploration of the largely uncharted physics of extensive entanglement, both analytical and numerical.

Spectral gaps of two- and three-dimensional many-body quantum systems in the thermodynamic limit

We present an expression for the spectral gap, opening up new possibilities for performing and accelerating spectral calculations of quantum many-body systems. We develop and demonstrate one such possibility in the context of tensor network simulations. Our approach requires only minor modifications of the widely used simple update method and is computationally lightweight relative to other approaches. We validate it by computing spectral gaps of the 2D and 3D transverse-field Ising models and find strong agreement with previously reported perturbation theory results. Published by the American Physical Society 2024