No Arabic abstract
Exploiting quantum properties to outperform classical ways of information-processing is an outstanding goal of modern physics. A promising route is quantum simulation, which aims at implementing relevant and computationally hard problems in controllable quantum systems. Here we demonstrate that in a trapped ion setup, with present day technology, it is possible to realize a spin model of the Mattis type that exhibits spin glass phases. Remarkably, our method produces the glassy behavior without the need for any disorder potential, just by controlling the detuning of the spin-phonon coupling. Applying a transverse field, the system can be used to benchmark quantum annealing strategies which aim at reaching the ground state of the spin glass starting from the paramagnetic phase. In the vicinity of a phonon resonance, the problem maps onto number partitioning, and instances which are difficult to address classically can be implemented.
We probe the transition between superfluid and Bose glass phases using quantum quenches of disorder in an ultracold atomic lattice gas that realizes the disordered Bose-Hubbard model. Measurements of excitations generated by the quench exhibit threshold behavior in the disorder strength indicative of a phase transition. Ab-initio quantum Monte Carlo simulations confirm that the appearance of excitations coincides with the equilibrium superfluid--Bose-glass phase boundary at different lattice potential depths. By varying the quench time, we demonstrate the disappearance of an adiabatic timescale compared with microscopic parameters in the BG regime.
With the advent of spatially resolved fluorescence imaging in quantum gas microscopes, it is now possible to directly image glassy phases and probe the local effects of disorder in a highly controllable setup. Here we present numerical calculations using a spatially-resolved local mean-field theory, show that it captures the essential physics of the disordered system and use it to simulate the density distributions seen in single-shot fluorescence microscopy. From these simulated images we extract local properties of the phases which are measurable by a quantum gas microscope and show that unambiguous detection of the Bose glass is possible. In particular, we show that experimental determination of the Edwards-Anderson order parameter is possible in a strongly correlated quantum system using existing experiments. We also suggest modifications to the experiments which will allow further properties of the Bose glass to be measured.
In this paper we introduce a new algorithm to study some NP-complete problems. This algorithm is a Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) inspired by the cavity method developed in the study of spin glass. We will focus on the maximum clique problem and we will compare this new algorithm with several standard algorithms on some DIMACS benchmark graphs and on random graphs. The performances of the new algorithm are quite surprising. Our effort in this paper is to be clear as well to those readers who are not in the field.
Understanding the collective behavior of strongly correlated electrons in materials remains a central problem in many-particle quantum physics. A minimal description of these systems is provided by the disordered Fermi-Hubbard model (DFHM), which incorporates the interplay of motion in a disordered lattice with local inter-particle interactions. Despite its minimal elements, many dynamical properties of the DFHM are not well understood, owing to the complexity of systems combining out-of-equilibrium behavior, interactions, and disorder in higher spatial dimensions. Here, we study the relaxation dynamics of doubly occupied lattice sites in the three-dimensional (3D) DFHM using interaction-quench measurements on a quantum simulator composed of fermionic atoms confined in an optical lattice. In addition to observing the widely studied effect of disorder inhibiting relaxation, we find that the cooperation between strong interactions and disorder also leads to the emergence of a dynamical regime characterized by textit{disorder-enhanced} relaxation. To support these results, we develop an approximate numerical method and a phenomenological model that each capture the essential physics of the decay dynamics. Our results provide a theoretical framework for a previously inaccessible regime of the DFHM and demonstrate the ability of quantum simulators to enable understanding of complex many-body systems through minimal models.
Classical models with complex energy landscapes represent a perspective avenue for the near-term application of quantum simulators. Until now, many theoretical works studied the performance of quantum algorithms for models with a unique ground state. However, when the classical problem is in a so-called clustering phase, the ground state manifold is highly degenerate. As an example, we consider a 3-XORSAT model defined on simple hypergraphs. The degeneracy of classical ground state manifold translates into the emergence of an extensive number of $Z_2$ symmetries, which remain intact even in the presence of a quantum transverse magnetic field. We establish a general duality approach that restricts the quantum problem to a given sector of conserved $Z_2$ charges and use it to study how the outcome of the quantum adiabatic algorithm depends on the hypergraph geometry. We show that the tree hypergraph which corresponds to a classically solvable instance of the 3-XORSAT problem features a constant gap, whereas the closed hypergraph encounters a second-order phase transition with a gap vanishing as a power-law in the problem size. The duality developed in this work provides a practical tool for studies of quantum models with classically degenerate energy manifold and reveals potential connections between glasses and gauge theories.