Quantum Ising Model Research Articles

Critical crossover phenomena driven by symmetry-breaking defects at quantum transitions.

We study the effects of symmetry-breaking defects at continuous quantum transitions (CQTs) of homogeneous systems, which may arise from localized external fields coupled to the order-parameter operator. The problem is addressed within renormalization-group (RG) and finite-size scaling frameworks. We consider the paradigmatic one-dimensional quantum Ising models at their CQT, in the presence of defects which break the global Z_{2} symmetry. We show that such defects can give rise to notable critical crossover regimes where the ground-state properties experience substantial and rapid changes, from symmetric conditions to characterization of these crossover phenomena driven by defects. In particular, this is demonstrated by analyzing the ground-state fidelity associated with small changes of the defect strength. Within the critical crossover regime, the fidelity susceptibility shows a power-law divergence when increasing the system size, related to the RG dimension of the defect strength; in contrast, outside the critical defect regime, it remains finite. We support the RG scaling arguments with numerical results.

Surveying Structural Complexity in Quantum Many-Body Systems

Quantum many-body systems exhibit a rich and diverse range of exotic behaviours, owing to their underlying non-classical structure. These systems present a deep structure beyond those that can be captured by measures of correlation and entanglement alone. Using tools from complexity science, we characterise such structure. We investigate the structural complexities that can be found within the patterns that manifest from the observational data of these systems. In particular, using two prototypical quantum many-body systems as test cases - the one-dimensional quantum Ising and Bose-Hubbard models - we explore how different information-theoretic measures of complexity are able to identify different features of such patterns. This work furthers the understanding of fully-quantum notions of structure and complexity in quantum systems and dynamics.

Applying the quantum approximate optimization algorithm to the minimum vertex cover problem

The minimum vertex cover problem belongs to a NP- complete problem, which is difficult to obtain the near-optimal solution in the polynomial time range using classical algorithms. In this paper, a quantum circuit solution scheme based on the quantum approximate optimization algorithm is presented for the minimum vertex cover problem. Firstly, the quantum Ising model and Hamiltonian of the problem are obtained based on the Ising model corresponding to the problem, which is quantized by the rotation operator and Pauli operator. Secondly, the parametric unitary transformation with the initial Hamiltonian and the problem Hamiltonian as the generator is obtained respectively. Through the alternating evolution of two parametric unitary transformations, the final quantum state and the problem Hamiltonian expectation are derived. In the process of evolution, the parameters in the parametric unitary transformations which are optimized by the classical processor can adjust the problem Hamiltonian expectation, so as to improve the probability of the problem solution. Then, the initial state of the algorithm and the quantum logic gate corresponding to the parametric unitary transformation are derived to generate the quantum circuit which can be implemented on the quantum computer. Simulation results show that the scheme can obtain the problem solution with high probability in polynomial time, realizes exponential acceleration, and has certain feasibility, effectiveness and innovation.

Analytical results for the unusual Grüneisen ratio in the quantum Ising model with Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya interaction

The Gr\"uneisen ratio (GR) has emerged as a superb tool for the diagnosis of quantum phase transitions, which diverges algebraically upon approaching critical points of continuous phase transitions. However, this paradigm has been challenged recently by observations of a finite GR for self-dual criticality and divergent GR at symmetry-enhanced first-order transitions. To unveil the fascinating GR further, we exemplify the idea by studying an exactly solvable quantum Ising model with Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya interaction, which harbors a ferromagnetic phase, a paramagnetic phase, and a chiral Luttinger liquid. Although the self-dual criticality of the ferromagnetic--paramagnetic transition is undermined by the Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya interaction, we find that the GR at the transition is still finite albeit with an increasing value, signifying a proximate self-dual relation. By contrast, the GR at the transition between the gapped ferromagnetic phase and the gapless Luttinger liquid diverges and changes its sign when crossing the first-order transition. This implies that the GR could also probe the first-order transition between the gapped and gapless phases.

Exact Solutions of Interacting Dissipative Systems via Weak Symmetries.

We demonstrate how the presence of continuous weak symmetry can be used to analytically diagonalize the Liouvillian of a class of Markovian dissipative systems with strong interactions or nonlinearity. This enables an exact description of the full dynamics and dissipative spectrum. Our method can be viewed as implementing an exact, sector-dependent mean-field decoupling, or alternatively, as a kind of quantum-to-classical mapping. We focus on two canonical examples: a nonlinear bosonic mode subject to incoherent loss and pumping, and an inhomogeneous quantum Ising model with arbitrary connectivity and local dissipation. In both cases, we calculate and analyze the full dissipation spectrum. Our method is applicable to a variety of other systems, and could provide a powerful new tool for the study of complex driven-dissipative quantum systems.

Glassy quantum dynamics of disordered Ising spins

We study the out-of-equilibrium dynamics of the quantum Ising model with power-law interactions and positional disorder. For arbitrary dimension $d$ and interaction range $\ensuremath{\alpha}\ensuremath{\ge}d$ we analytically find a stretched-exponential decay of the global magnetization and ensemble-averaged single-spin purity with a stretch power $\ensuremath{\beta}=d/\ensuremath{\alpha}$ in the thermodynamic limit. Numerically, we confirm that glassy behavior persists for finite system sizes and sufficiently strong disorder. We identify dephasing between disordered coherent pairs as the main mechanism leading to a relaxation of global magnetization, whereas genuine many-body interactions lead to a loss of single-spin purity which signifies the buildup of entanglement. The emergence of glassy dynamics in the quantum Ising model extends prior findings in classical and open quantum systems, where the stretched-exponential law is explained by a scale-invariant distribution of timescales, to both integrable and nonintegrable quantum systems.

Dissipative cooling induced by pulse perturbations

We investigate the dynamics brought on by an impulse perturbation in two infinite-range quantum Ising models coupled to each other and to a dissipative bath. We show that, if dissipation is faster the higher the excitation energy, the pulse perturbation cools down the low-energy sector of the system, at the expense of the high-energy one, eventually stabilising a transient symmetry-broken state at temperatures higher than the equilibrium critical one. Such non-thermal quasi-steady state may survive for quite a long time after the pulse, if the latter is properly tailored.

Measurement-Induced Transition in Long-Range Interacting Quantum Circuits.

The competition between scrambling unitary evolution and projective measurements leads to a phase transition in the dynamics of quantum entanglement. Here, we demonstrate that the nature of this transition is fundamentally altered by the presence of long-range, power-law interactions. For sufficiently weak power laws, the measurement-induced transition is described by conformal field theory, analogous to short-range-interacting hybrid circuits. However, beyond a critical power law, we demonstrate that long-range interactions give rise to a continuum of nonconformal universality classes, with continuously varying critical exponents. We numerically determine the phase diagram for a one-dimensional, long-range-interacting hybrid circuit model as a function of the power-law exponent and the measurement rate. Finally, by using an analytic mapping to a long-range quantum Ising model, we provide a theoretical understanding for the critical power law.

Improving readout in quantum simulations with repetition codes

Near term quantum computers suffer from the presence of different noise sources. In order to mitigate for this effect and acquire results with significantly better accuracy, there is the urge of designing efficient error correction or error mitigation schemes. The cost of such techniques is usually high in terms of resource requirements, either in hardware or at the algorithmic level. In this work, we follow a pragmatic approach and we use repetition codes as scalable schemes with the potential to provide more accurate solutions to problems of interest in quantum chemistry and physics. We investigate different repetition code layouts and we propose a circular repetition scheme with connectivity requirements that are native on IBM Quantum hardware. We showcase our approach in multiple IBM Quantum devices and validate our results using a simplified theoretical noise model. We highlight the effect of using the proposed scheme in an electronic structure variational quantum eigensolver calculation and in the simulation of time evolution for a quantum Ising model.

Influence functional of many-body systems: Temporal entanglement and matrix-product state representation

Feynman–Vernon influence functional (IF) was originally introduced to describe the effect of a quantum environment on the dynamics of an open quantum system. We apply the IF approach to describe quantum many-body dynamics in isolated spin systems, viewing the system as an environment for its local subsystems. While the IF can be computed exactly only in certain many-body models, it generally satisfies a self-consistency equation, provided the system, or an ensemble of systems, are translationally invariant. We view the IF as a fictitious wavefunction in the temporal domain, and approximate it using matrix-product states (MPS). This approach is efficient provided the temporal entanglement of the IF is sufficiently low. We illustrate the broad applicability of the IF approach by analyzing several models that exhibit a range of dynamical behaviors, from thermalizing to many-body localized. In particular, we study the non-equilibrium dynamics in the quantum Ising model in both Floquet and Hamiltonian settings. We find that temporal entanglement entropy may be significantly lower compared to the spatial entanglement and analyze the IF in the continuous-time limit. We simulate the thermodynamic-limit evolution of local observables in various regimes, including the relaxation of impurities embedded in an infinite-temperature chain, and the long-lived oscillatory dynamics of the magnetization associated with the confinement of excitations. Furthermore, by incorporating disorder-averaging into the formalism, we analyze discrete time-crystalline response using the IF of a bond-disordered kicked Ising chain. In this case, we find that the temporal entanglement entropy scales logarithmically with evolution time. The IF approach offers a new lens on many-body non-equilibrium phenomena, both in ergodic and non-ergodic regimes, connecting the theory of open quantum systems to quantum statistical physics.

Powerful method to evaluate the mass gaps of free-particle quantum critical systems

We present a numerical method for the evaluation of the mass gap, and the low-lying energy gaps, of a large family of free-fermionic and free-parafermionic quantum chains. The method is suitable for some generalizations of the quantum Ising and XY models with multispin interactions. We illustrate the method by considering the Ising quantum chains with uniform and random coupling constants. The mass gaps of these quantum chains are obtained from the largest root of a characteristic polynomial. We also show that the Laguerre bound, for the largest root of a polynomial, used as an initial guess for the largest root in the method, gives us estimates for the mass gaps sharing the same leading finite-size behavior as the exact results. This opens an interesting possibility of obtaining precise critical properties very efficiently which we explore by studying the critical point and the paramagnetic Griffiths phase of the quantum Ising chain with random couplings. In this last phase, we obtain the effective dynamical critical exponent as a function of the distance-to-criticality. Finally, we compare the mass gap estimates derived from the Laguerre bound and the strong-disorder renormalization-group method. Both estimates require comparable computational efforts, with the former having the advantage of being more accurate and also being applicable away from infinite-randomness fixed points. We believe this method is a relevant tool for tackling critical quantum chains with and without quenched disorder.

From Ising Model to Kitaev Chain

In this general article, we map the one-dimensional transverse field quantum Ising model of ferromagnetism to Kitaev's one-dimensional p-wave superconductor, which has its application in fault-tolerant topological quantum computing. Mapping Pauli's spin operators of transverse Ising chain to spinless fermionic creation and annihilation operators by Inverse Jordan-Wigner transformation leads to a Hamiltonian form closely related to Kitaev Chain, which exhibits topological phase transition where phases are characterized by different topological invariant that changes discontinuously at the transition point. Kitaev Chain supports two Majorana zero modes (MZMs) in the non-trivial topological phase, while none is in the trivial phase. The doubly degenerate ground state of the transverse Ising in ferromagnetic phase corresponds to non-local free fermion degree made from MZMs. The quasi-particle excitations of Ising chain, viz., domain wall formation in the ferromagnetic phase and spin-flip in paramagnetic phase maps to Bogoliubon excitations. The mapping suggests that a non-local order parameter can be defined for Kitaev Chain to work with the usual paradigm of Landau's theory.

Finite-temperature critical behavior of long-range quantum Ising models

We study the phase diagram and critical properties of quantum Ising chains with long-range ferromagnetic interactions decaying in a power-law fashion with exponent \alphaα, in regimes of direct interest for current trapped ion experiments. Using large-scale path integral Monte Carlo simulations, we investigate both the ground-state and the nonzero-temperature regimes. We identify the phase boundary of the ferromagnetic phase and obtain accurate estimates for the ferromagnetic-paramagnetic transition temperatures. We further determine the critical exponents of the respective transitions. Our results are in agreement with existing predictions for interaction exponents \alpha<1α>1 up to small deviations in some critical exponents. We also address the elusive regime \alpha < 1α<1, where we find that the universality class of both the ground-state and nonzero-temperature transition is consistent with the mean-field limit at \alpha = 0α=0. Our work not only contributes to the understanding of the equilibrium properties of long-range interacting quantum Ising models, but can also be important for addressing fundamental dynamical aspects, such as issues concerning the open question of thermalization in such models.

Photon Condensation and Enhanced Magnetism in Cavity QED.

A system of magnetic molecules coupled to microwave cavities (LC resonators) undergoes the equilibrium superradiant phase transition. The transition is experimentally observable. The effect of the coupling is first illustrated by the vacuum-induced ferromagnetic order in a quantum Ising model and then by the modification of the magnetic phase diagram of Fe_{8} dipolar crystals, exemplifying the cooperation between intrinsic and photon-induced spin-spin interactions. Finally, a transmission experiment is shown to resolve the transition, measuring the quantum electrodynamical control of magnetism.

Phase transitions in the frustrated Ising ladder with stoquastic and nonstoquastic catalysts

The role of nonstoquasticity in the field of quantum annealing and adiabatic quantum computing is an actively debated topic. We study a strongly-frustrated quasi-one-dimensional quantum Ising model on a two-leg ladder to elucidate how a first-order phase transition with a topological origin is affected by interactions of the $\pm XX$-type. Such interactions are sometimes known as stoquastic (negative sign) and nonstoquastic (positive sign) "catalysts". Carrying out a symmetry-preserving real-space renormalization group analysis and extensive density-matrix renormalization group computations, we show that the phase diagrams obtained by these two methods are in qualitative agreement with each other and reveal that the first-order quantum phase transition of a topological nature remains stable against the introduction of both $XX$-type catalysts. This is the first study of the effects of nonstoquasticity on a first-order phase transition between topologically distinct phases. Our results indicate that nonstoquastic catalysts are generally insufficient for removing topological obstacles in quantum annealing and adiabatic quantum computing.

Hilbert curve vs Hilbert space: exploiting fractal 2D covering to increase tensor network efficiency

We present a novel mapping for studying 2D many-body quantum systems by solving an effective, one-dimensional long-range model in place of the original two-dimensional short-range one. In particular, we address the problem of choosing an efficient mapping from the 2D lattice to a 1D chain that optimally preserves the locality of interactions within the TN structure. By using Matrix Product States (MPS) and Tree Tensor Network (TTN) algorithms, we compute the ground state of the 2D quantum Ising model in transverse field with lattice size up to 64×64, comparing the results obtained from different mappings based on two space-filling curves, the snake curve and the Hilbert curve. We show that the locality-preserving properties of the Hilbert curve leads to a clear improvement of numerical precision, especially for large sizes, and turns out to provide the best performances for the simulation of 2D lattice systems via 1D TN structures.

Open spin chain realization of a topological defect in a one-dimensional Ising model: Boundary and bulk symmetry

We study the realizations of topological defects in a one-dimensional quantum Ising model with an open boundary condition at criticality. Applying the construction discussed in M. Hauru, G. Evenbly, W. W. Ho, D. Gaiotto, and G. Vidal, Phys. Rev. B 94, 115125 (2016), we prove that the Ising model on an open chain with multiple topological defects can be transformed to the same model with boundary magnetic fields and noninteracting boundary degrees of freedom. This results in the appearance of a linear combination of Cardy states, which can be interpreted as an edge state of the spin or fermion chain. We show that this edge state with the large boundary entropy can be protected under bulk perturbation, whereas it is fragile to a boundary perturbation. Our formulation suggests the existence of nontrivial edge physics under the existence of topological defects and opens many interesting questions for future analysis related to boundary and bulk physics.

Time evolution of an infinite projected entangled pair state: Neighborhood tensor update

The simple update (SU) and full update (FU) are the two paradigmatic time evolution algorithms for a tensor network known as the infinite projected entangled pair state (iPEPS). They differ by an error measure that is either, respectively, local or takes into account full infinite tensor environment. In this paper we test an intermediate neighborhood tensor update (NTU) accounting for the nearest neighbor environment. This small environment can be contracted exactly in a parallelizable way. It provides an error measure that is Hermitian and non-negative down to machine precision. In the 2D quantum Ising model NTU is shown to yield stable unitary time evolution following a sudden quench. It also yields accurate thermal states despite correlation lengths that reach up to 20 lattice sites. The latter simulations were performed with a manifestly Hermitian purification of a thermal state. Both were performed with reduced tensors that do not include physical (and ancilla) indices. This modification naturally leads to two other schemes: a local SVD update (SVDU) and a full tensor update (FTU) being a variant of FU.

Many-Body Quantum Zeno Effect and Measurement-Induced Subradiance Transition

It is well known that by repeatedly measuring a quantum system it is possible to completely freeze its dynamics into a well defined state, a signature of the quantum Zeno effect. Here we show that for a many-body system evolving under competing unitary evolution and variable-strength measurements the onset of the Zeno effect takes the form of a sharp phase transition. Using the Quantum Ising chain with continuous monitoring of the transverse magnetization as paradigmatic example we show that for weak measurements the entanglement produced by the unitary dynamics remains protected, and actually enhanced by the monitoring, while only above a certain threshold the system is sharply brought into an uncorrelated Zeno state. We show that this transition is invisible to the average dynamics, but encoded in the rare fluctuations of the stochastic measurement process, which we show to be perfectly captured by a non-Hermitian Hamiltonian which takes the form of a Quantum Ising model in an imaginary valued transverse field. We provide analytical results based on the fermionization of the non-Hermitian Hamiltonian in supports of our exact numerical calculations.

Bounding the finite-size error of quantum many-body dynamics simulations

Finite-size error (FSE), the discrepancy between an observable in a finite system and in the thermodynamic limit, is ubiquitous in numerical simulations of quantum many body systems. Although a rough estimate of these errors can be obtained from a sequence of finite-size results, a strict, quantitative bound on the magnitude of FSE is still missing. Here we derive rigorous upper bounds on the FSE of local observables in real time quantum dynamics simulations initialized from a product state. In $d$-dimensional locally interacting systems with a finite local Hilbert space, our bound implies $ |\langle \hat{S}(t)\rangle_L-\langle \hat{S}(t)\rangle_\infty|\leq C(2v t/L)^{cL-\mu}$, with $v$, $C$, $c$, $\mu $ constants independent of $L$ and $t$, which we compute explicitly. For periodic boundary conditions (PBC), the constant $c$ is twice as large as that for open boundary conditions (OBC), suggesting that PBC have smaller FSE than OBC at early times. The bound can be generalized to a large class of correlated initial states as well. As a byproduct, we prove that the FSE of local observables in ground state simulations decays exponentially with $L$, under a suitable spectral gap condition. Our bounds are practically useful in determining the validity of finite-size results, as we demonstrate in simulations of the one-dimensional (1D) quantum Ising and Fermi-Hubbard models.