No Arabic abstract
Considering two-dimensional electron gases under a perpendicular magnetic field, we pinpoint a specific kind of long-range bipartite entanglement of the electronic motions. This entanglement is achieved through the introduction of bicomplex spinorial eigenfunctions admitting a polar decomposition in terms of a real modulus and three real phases. Within this bicomplex geometry the cyclotron motions of two electrons are intrinsically tied, so that the highlighted eigenstates of the kinetic energy operator actually describe the free motion of a genuine electron pair. Most remarkably, these states embody phase singularities in the four-dimensional (4D) space, with singular points corresponding to the simultaneous undetermination of the three phases. Because the entanglement between the two electrons forming a pair, as well as the winding and parity quantum numbers characterizing the 4D phase singularity, are topological in nature, we expect them to manifest some robustness in the presence of a smooth disorder potential and an electron-electron interaction potential. The relevance of this effective approach in terms of 4D vortices of electron pairs is discussed in the context of the fractional quantum Hall effect.
Quantum entanglement, as the strictly non-classical phenomena, is the kernel of quantum computing and quantum simulation, and has been widely applied ranging from fundamental tests of quantum physics to quantum information processing. The decoherence of quantum states restricts the capability of building quantum simulators and quantum computers in a scalable fashion. Meanwhile, the topological phase is found inherently capable of protecting physical fields from unavoidable fabrication-induced disorder, which inspires the potential application of topological protection on quantum states. Here, we present the first experimental demonstration of topologically protected quantum polarization entangled states on a photonic chip. The process tomography shows that quantum entanglement can be well preserved by the boundary states even when the chip material substantially introduces relative polarization rotation in phase space. Our work links topology, material and quantum physics, opening the door to wide applications of topological enhancement in genuine quantum regime.
For successful realization of a quantum computer, its building blocks (qubits) should be simultaneously scalable and sufficiently protected from environmental noise. Recently, a novel approach to the protection of superconducting qubits has been proposed. The idea is to prevent errors at the hardware level, by building a fault-free (topologically protected) logical qubit from faulty physical qubits with properly engineered interactions between them. It has been predicted that the decoupling of a protected logical qubit from local noises would grow exponentially with the number of physical qubits. Here we report on the proof-of-concept experiments with a prototype device which consists of twelve physical qubits made of nanoscale Josephson junctions. We observed that due to properly tuned quantum fluctuations, this qubit is protected against magnetic flux variations well beyond linear order, in agreement with theoretical predictions. These results demonstrate the feasibility of topologically protected superconducting qubits.
Precise control of elastic waves in modes and coherences is of great use in reinforcing nowadays elastic energy harvesting/storage, nondestructive testing, wave-mater interaction, high sensitivity sensing and information processing, etc. All these implementations are expected to have elastic transmission with lower transmission losses and higher degree of freedom in transmission path. Inspired by topological states of quantum matters, especially quantum spin Hall effects (QSHEs) providing passive solutions of unique disorder-immune surface states protected by underlying nontrivial topological invariants of the bulk, thus solving severe performance trade-offs in experimentally realizable topologically ordered states. Here, we demonstrate experimentally the first elastic analogue of QSHE, by a concise phononic crystal plate with only perforated holes. Strong elastic spin-orbit coupling is realized accompanied by the first topologically-protected phononic circuits with both robustness and negligible propagation loss overcoming many circuit- and system-level performance limits induced by scattering. This elegant approach in a monolithic substrate opens up the possibility of realizing topological materials for phonons in both static and time-dependent regimes, can be immediately applied to multifarious chip-scale devices with both topological protection and massive integration, such as on-chip elastic wave-guiding, elastic splitter, elastic resonator with high quality factor, and even (pseudo-)spin filter.
We measure the Hall conductivity of a two-dimensional electron gas formed at a GaAs/AlGaAs heterojunction in the terahertz regime close to the cyclotron resonance frequency by employing a highly sensitive Faraday rotation method coupled with electrical gating of the sample to change the electron density. We observe clear plateau-and step-like features in the Faraday rotation angle vs. electron density and magnetic field (Landau-level filling factor), which are the high frequency manifestation of quantum Hall plateaus - a signature of topologically protected edge states. The results are compared to a recent dynamical scaling theory.
We propose a topological plasmonic crystal structure composed of an array of parallel nanowires with unequal spacing. In the paraxial approximation, the Helmholtz equation that describes the propagation of light along the nanowires maps onto the Schr{o}dinger equation of the Su-Schrieffer-Heeger (SSH) model. Using full three-dimensional finite difference time domain solution of the Maxwell equations we demonstrate the existence of topological defect modes, with sub-wavelength localization, bound to kinks of the plasmonic crystal. Furthermore, we show that by manipulating kinks we can construct spatial mode filters, that couple bulk modes to topological defect modes, and topological beam-splitters that couple two topological defect modes. Finally, we show that the structures are robust to fabrication errors with inverse length-scale smaller than the topological band gap.