No Arabic abstract
The time evolution of quantum many-body systems is one of the least understood frontiers of physics. The most curious feature of such dynamics is, generically, the growth of quantum entanglement with time to an amount proportional to the system size (volume law) even when the interactions are local. This phenomenon, unobserved to date, has great ramifications for fundamental issues such as thermalisation and black-hole formation, while its optimisation clearly has an impact on technology (e.g., for on-chip quantum networking). Here we use an integrated photonic chip to simulate the dynamics of a spin chain, a canonical many-body system. A digital approach is used to engineer the evolution so as to maximise the generation of entanglement. The resulting volume law growth of entanglement is certified by constructing a second chip, which simultaneously measures the entanglement between multiple distant pairs of simulated spins. This is the first experimental verification of the volume law and opens up the use of photonic circuits as a unique tool for the optimisation of quantum devices.
We investigate the entanglement of the ferromagnetic XY model in a random magnetic field at zero temperature and in the uniform magnetic field at finite temperatures. We use the concurrence to quantify the entanglement. We find that, in the ferromagnetic region of the uniform magnetic field $h$, all the concurrences are textit{generated} by the random magnetic field and by the thermal fluctuation. In one particular region of $h$, the next-nearest neighbor concurrence is generated by the random field but not at finite temperatures. We also find that the qualitative behavior of the maximum point of the entanglement in the random magnetic field depends on whether the variance of its distribution function is finite or not.
We consider the variation of von Neumann entropy of subsystem reduced states of general many- body lattice spin systems due to local quantum quenches. We obtain Lieb-Robinson-like bounds that are independent of the subsystem volume. The main assumptions are that the Hamiltonian satisfies a Lieb-Robinson bound and that the volume of spheres on the lattice grows at most exponentially with their radius. More specifically, the bound exponentially increases with time but exponentially decreases with the distance between the subsystem and the region where the quench takes place. The fact that the bound is independent of the subsystem volume leads to stronger constraints (than previously known) on the propagation of information throughout many-body systems. In particular, it shows that bipartite entanglement satisfies an effective light cone, regardless of system size. Further implications to t density-matrix renormalization-group simulations of quantum spin chains and limitations to the propagation of information are discussed.
We study the magnetic susceptibility of 1D quantum XY model, and show that when the temperature approaches zero, the magnetic susceptibility exhibits the finite-temperature scaling behavior. This scaling behavior of the magnetic susceptibility in 1D quantum XY model, due to the quantum-classical mapping, can be easily experimentally tested. Furthermore, the universality in the critical properties of the magnetic susceptibility in quantum XY model is verified. Our study also reveals the close relation between the magnetic susceptibility and the geometric phase in some spin systems, where the quantum phase transitions are driven by an external magnetic field.
We analyze fermions after an interaction quantum quench in one spatial dimension and study the growth of the steady state entanglement entropy density under either a spatial mode or particle bipartition. For integrable lattice models, we find excellent agreement between the increase of spatial and particle entanglement entropy, and for chaotic models, an examination of two further neighbor interaction strengths suggests similar correspondence. This result highlights the generality of the dynamical conversion of entanglement to thermodynamic entropy under time evolution that underlies our current framework of quantum statistical mechanics.
Recently, a non-trivial relation between the quasi-particle spectrum and entanglement entropy production was discovered in non-integrable quenches in the paramagnetic Ising quantum spin chain. Here we study the dynamics of analogous quenches in the quantum Potts spin chain. Tuning the parameters of the system, we observe a sudden increase in the entanglement production rate, which is shown to be related to the appearance of new quasiparticle excitations in the post-quench spectrum. Our results demonstrate the generality of the effect and support its interpretation as the non-equilibrium version of the well-known Gibbs paradox related to mixing entropy which appears in systems with a non-trivial quasi-particle spectrum.