Quantum-critical Environment Research Articles

The study of quantum speed limit time in a quantum critical environment

Quantum theory sets a bound on the speed of quantum evolution. The shortest time needed for a quantm system to evolve from an initial state to the target state is known as the quantum speed limit time. The study of this time in open and closed quantum systems has been the subject of much work in quantum information theory. Quantum speed limit time is inversely related to the evolution rate of a quantum process. This relation is such that the speed of evolution decreases with increasing quantum speed limit time and vice versa. In this work we study the QSL time for the case in which a qubit interacts with a quantum critical environment. We choose the environment to be an Ising spin chain in a transverse field. It is observed that for the quantum speed limit time has a direct relation with quantum coherence of the initial state of the system. We will also study the effect of perturbation coupling on quantum speed limit time. It is observed that the quantum speed limit time decreases with increasing the coupling parameter. It is also observed that the quantum speed limit time decreases with increasing the number of spin in spin chain.

Scrutinizing entropic uncertainty and quantum discord in an open system under quantum critical environment

We explore the dynamics of quantum discord (QD) and entropic uncertainty lower bound for a two-qubit system independently coupled to an Ising spin chain. For this model, we obtain the analytic results of QD and uncertainty bound and find that there is a trade-off between them. We also examine the effect of the number of spins and the coupling strength to a transverse field on these two quantum criteria.

Quantum speed limit for a three-qubit system in spin-chain environment with multisite interaction

We study the relationship between the quantum speed limit (QSL) time of a three-qubit system, and the quantum phase transitions (QPTs) of a spin-chain environment with the three-spin interaction. We find that the three-spin interaction can effectively manipulate the critical value of the QSL time. It makes the QSL time mark more clearly the quantum phase transition of the one-dimensional spin-chain models, especially the XX model. The dynamical evolution of the QSL time presents a periodic behavior in quantum-critical environment, whereas the three-spin interaction and external magnetic field can destroy this periodicity.

Halon: A quasiparticle featuring critical charge fractionalization

The halon is a special critical state of an impurity in a quantum-critical environment. The hallmark of the halon physics is that a well-defined integer charge gets fractionalized into two parts: a microscopic core with half-integer charge and a critically large halo carrying a complementary charge of $\pm 1/2$. The halon phenomenon emerges when the impurity--environment interaction is fine-tuned to the vicinity of a boundary quantum critical point (BQCP), at which the energies of two quasiparticle states with adjacent integer charges approach each other. The universality class of such BQCP is captured by a model of pseudo-spin-$1/2$ impurity coupled to the quantum-critical environment, in such a way that the rotational symmetry in the pseudo-spin $xy$-plane is respected, with a small local "magnetic" field along the pseudo-spin $z$-axis playing the role of control parameter driving the system away from the BQCP. On the approach to BQCP, the half-integer projection of the pseudo-spin on its $z$-axis gets delocalized into a halo of critically divergent radius, capturing the essence of the phenomenon of charge fractionalization. With large-scale Monte Carlo simulations, we confirm the existence of halons---and quantify their universal features---in O(2) and O(3) quantum critical systems.

Quantized magnetic flux and the magnetohalon effect in a critical superconductor

Employing the standard worldline-vortex mapping, we conclude that at the critical temperature, superconductors demonstrate the magneto-halon effect with respect to the quantized net magnetic flux generated by a solenoid inserted into the system. The effect is a direct counterpart of the recently revealed halon effect in terms of the quantized particle charge of a static impurity in the two-dimensional U(1) quantum-critical environment. The flux-loop model (a.k.a. frozen lattice superconductor) with a quasi-solenoid perturbation proves to be the model of choice for qualitative and quantitative description of both the halon and the magneto-halon effects.

Quantum coherence dynamics of three-qubit states in XY spin-chain environment

We investigate the dynamics of quantum coherence, based on relative entropy and quantum skew information, for tripartite systems in a quantum-critical environment. We demonstrate that initial states, the strength of magnetic field, anisotropy parameter, system–environment coupling, and the scale of the environment strongly affect coherence evolution. We find that two measures of coherence are frozen for the initial W state coupled to an XY spin-chain environment as the system–environment coupling satisfies certain conditions. We compare the dynamics of quantum coherence with that of the entanglement and the quantum discord. The analysis shows no hierarchical relationship among them.

Quantum critical environment assisted quantum magnetometer

A central qubit coupled to an Ising ring of N qubits, operating close to a critical point is investigated as a potential precision quantum magnetometer for estimating an applied transverse magnetic field. We compute the quantum Fisher information for the central, probe qubit with the Ising chain initialized in its ground state or in a thermal state. The non-unitary evolution of the central qubit due to its interaction with the surrounding Ising ring enhances the accuracy of the magnetic field measurement. Near the critical point of the ring, Heisenberg-like scaling of the precision in estimating the magnetic field is obtained when the ring is initialized in its ground state. However, for finite temperatures, the Heisenberg scaling is limited to lower ranges of N values.

Dynamics of quantum discord in a quantum critical environment

We study the dynamics of quantum discord (QD) of two qubits independently coupled to an Ising spin chain in a transverse field, which exhibits a quantum phase transition. For this model, we drive the corresponding Kraus operators, obtain the analytic results of QD and compare the dynamics of QD with the dynamics of relative entropy of entanglement nearby the critical point. It is shown that the impact of the quantum criticality environment on QD can be concentrated in a very narrow region nearby the critical point, so it supplies an efficient way to detect the critical points. In the vicinity of the critical point, the evolution of QD is shown to be more complicated than that of entanglement. Furthermore, we find that separable states can also be used to reflect the quantum criticality of the environment.

Quantum discord induced by a spin chain with quantum phase transition

We study quantum discord induced by a quantum-critical environment. Two spin halves are independently coupled to the common environment which is modelled by the Ising spin chain in a transverse field. During the time evolution, non-zero discord is induced whereas entanglement cannot be induced due to the special initial state chosen by us. For some cases we analytically obtain quantum discord and its geometric measure. From the numerical results, one can observe that induced quantum discord increases quickly from zero to a steady value when the environment approaches the critical point. Moreover, induced discord may reach its maximum close to the critical point. The special phenomena of induced discord can be used to indicate quantum criticality. We also consider another environment modelled by the spin-1/2 XX chain with three-spin interaction, which also displays second-order quantum phase transition.

Tripartite states Bell-nonlocality sudden death in a quantum-critical environment

We demonstrate that multipartite Bell-inequalities violations can be fully destroyed in finite time in three-qubit states under a quantum-critical environment, which is an Ising model in a transverse field. We use the Mermin-Ardehali—Belinksii—Klyshko (MABK) inequality to detect the degree of nonlocality as measured by the extent of their violations. The effects of system-environment couplings, the size of degrees of freedom of environment and the strength of transverse field on the Bell-inequality violations are given for two different initial states, namely, the W class and GHZ class states. The results indicate that the Bell-inequality violations of the tripartite states will be completely destroyed by the decoherence under certain conditions.

Fisher information in a quantum-critical environment

We consider a process of parameter estimation in a spin-j system surrounded by a quantum-critical spin chain. Quantum Fisher information lies at the heart of the estimation task. We employ Ising spin chain in a transverse field as the environment which exhibits a quantum phase transition. Fisher information decays with time almost monotonously when the environment reaches the critical point. By choosing a fixed time or taking the time average, one can see the quantum Fisher information presents a sudden drop at the critical point. Different initial states of the environment are considered. The phenomenon that the quantum Fisher information, namely, the precision of estimation, changes dramatically can be used to detect the quantum criticality of the environment. We also introduce a general method to obtain the maximal Fisher information for a given state.

Entanglement dynamics from quantum critical environment: Role of Dzyaloshinsky–Moriya interaction

We investigate the temporal evolution of entanglement of three spin qubits coupled to an XY spin-chain with Dzyaloshinsky–Moriya (DM) interaction environment. For an initial state with W, we find that the DM interaction can enhance slightly the decay of entanglement both in the weak coupling region and strong coupling one. However, for an initial state with GHZ, the decay of entanglement is very sensitive to the DM interaction in the strong coupling region.

Entanglement evolution of three-qubit states in a quantum-critical environment

We investigate the entanglement dynamics of three-qubit states in a quantum-critical environment, which is an Ising model in a transverse field. By using negativity as entanglement measure, we find that the entanglement evolution depends not only on the system-environment couplings and the size of degrees of freedom of environment but also on the strength of transverse field and the symmetry of quantum states of concern. In particular, for the cases under study, our results imply that the entanglement decay can be enhanced by the quantum phase transition of the environment under weak coupling. Our analysis implies that the entanglement of any three-qubit quantum state will be completely destroyed by the decoherence under certain conditions, that we detail below.