No Arabic abstract
The recent observation of the dynamical Casimir effect in a modulated superconducting waveguide, coronating thirty years of world-wide research, empowered the quantum technology community with a powerful tool to create entangled photons on-chip. In this work we show how, going beyond the single waveguide paradigm using a scalable array, it is possible to create multipartite nonclassical states, with the possibility to control the long-range quantum correlations of the emitted photons. In particular, our finite-temperature theory shows how maximally entangled $NOON$ states can be engineered in a realistic setup. The results here presented open the way to new kinds of quantum fluids of light, arising from modulated vacuum fluctuations in linear systems.
The non-equilibrium response of a quantum many-body system defines its fundamental transport properties and how initially localized quantum information spreads. However, for long-range-interacting quantum systems little is known. We address this issue by analyzing a local quantum quench in the long-range Ising model in a transverse field, where interactions decay as a variable power-law with distance $propto r^{-alpha}$, $alpha>0$. Using complementary numerical and analytical techniques, we identify three dynamical regimes: short-range-like with an emerging light cone for $alpha>2$; weakly long-range for $1<alpha<2$ without a clear light cone but with a finite propagation speed of almost all excitations; and fully non-local for $alpha<1$ with instantaneous transmission of correlations. This last regime breaks generalized Lieb--Robinson bounds and thus locality. Numerical calculation of the entanglement spectrum demonstrates that the usual picture of propagating quasi-particles remains valid, allowing an intuitive interpretation of our findings via divergences of quasi-particle velocities. Our results may be tested in state-of-the-art trapped-ion experiments.
The maximum speed with which information can propagate in a quantum many-body system directly affects how quickly disparate parts of the system can become correlated and how difficult the system will be to describe numerically. For systems with only short-range interactions, Lieb and Robinson derived a constant-velocity bound that limits correlations to within a linear effective light cone. However, little is known about the propagation speed in systems with long-range interactions, since the best long-range bound is too loose to give the correct light-cone shape for any known spin model and since analytic solutions rarely exist. In this work, we experimentally determine the spatial and time-dependent correlations of a far-from-equilibrium quantum many-body system evolving under a long-range Ising- or XY-model Hamiltonian. For several different interaction ranges, we extract the shape of the light cone and measure the velocity with which correlations propagate through the system. In many cases we find increasing propagation velocities, which violate the Lieb-Robinson prediction, and in one instance cannot be explained by any existing theory. Our results demonstrate that even modestly-sized quantum simulators are well-poised for studying complicated many-body systems that are intractable to classical computation.
We study the fundamental limitations of cooling to absolute zero for a qubit, interacting with a single mode of the electromagnetic field. Our results show that the dynamical Casimir effect, which is unavoidable in any finite-time thermodynamic cycle, forbids the attainability of the absolute zero of temperature, even in the limit of an infinite number of cycles.
The character of turbulence depends on where it develops. Turbulence near boundaries, for instance, is different than in a free stream. To elucidate the differences between flows, it is instructive to vary the structure of turbulence systematically, but there are few ways of stirring turbulence that make this possible. In other words, an experiment typically examines either a boundary layer or a free stream, say, and the structure of the turbulence is fixed by the geometry of the experiment. We introduce a new active grid with many more degrees of freedom than previous active grids. The additional degrees of freedom make it possible to control various properties of the turbulence. We show how long-range correlations in the turbulent velocity fluctuations can be shaped by changing the way the active grid moves. Specifically, we show how not only the correlation length but also the detailed shape of the correlation function depends on the correlations imposed in the motions of the grid. Until now, large-scale structure had not been adjustable in experiments. This new capability makes possible new systematic investigations into turbulence dissipation and dispersion, for example, and perhaps in flows that mimic features of boundary layers, free streams, and flows of intermediate character.
We introduce an alternative type of quantum repeater for long-range quantum communication with improved scaling with the distance. We show that by employing hashing, a deterministic entanglement distillation protocol with one-way communication, one obtains a scalable scheme that allows one to reach arbitrary distances, with constant overhead in resources per repeater station, and ultrahigh rates. In practical terms, we show that also with moderate resources of a few hundred qubits at each repeater station, one can reach intercontinental distances. At the same time, a measurement-based implementation allows one to tolerate high loss, but also operational and memory errors of the order of several percent per qubit. This opens the way for long-distance communication of big quantum data.