No Arabic abstract
Recent experiments have focused attention on the properties of chains of atoms in which the atoms are either in their ground states or in highly excited Rydberg states which block similar excitations in their immediate neighbors. As the low energy Hilbert space of such chains is isomorphic to that of a chain of Fibonacci anyons, they have been proposed as a platform for topological quantum computation and for simulating anyon dynamics. We show that generic local operators in the Rydberg chain correspond to non-local anyonic operators that do not preserve a topological symmetry of the physical anyons. Consequently, we argue that Rydberg chains do not yield Fibonacci anyons and quantum computation with Rydberg atoms is not topologically protected.
A defining property of particles is their behavior under exchange. In two dimensions anyons can exist which, opposed to fermions and bosons, gain arbitrary relative phase factors or even undergo a change of their type. In the latter case one speaks of non-Abelian anyons - a particularly simple and aesthetic example of which are Fibonacci anyons. They have been studied in the context of fractional quantum Hall physics where they occur as quasiparticles in the $k=3$ Read-Rezayi state, which is conjectured to describe a fractional quantum Hall state at filling fraction $ u=12/5$. Here we show that the physics of interacting Fibonacci anyons can be studied with strongly interacting Rydberg atoms in a lattice, when due to the dipole blockade the simultaneous laser excitation of adjacent atoms is forbidden. The Hilbert space maps then directly on the fusion space of Fibonacci anyons and a proper tuning of the laser parameters renders the system into an interacting topological liquid of non-Abelian anyons. We discuss the low-energy properties of this system and show how to experimentally measure anyonic observables.
A topological quantum computer should allow intrinsically fault-tolerant quantum computation, but there remains uncertainty about how such a computer can be implemented. It is known that topological quantum computation can be implemented with limited quasiparticle braiding capabilities, in fact using only a single mobile quasiparticle, if the system can be properly initialized by measurements. It is also known that measurements alone suffice without any braiding, provided that the measurement devices can be dynamically created and modified. We study a model in which both measurement and braiding capabilities are limited. Given the ability to pull nontrivial Fibonacci anyon pairs from the vacuum with a certain success probability, we show how to simulate universal quantum computation by braiding one quasiparticle and with only one measurement, to read out the result. The difficulty lies in initializing the system. We give a systematic construction of a family of braid sequences that initialize to arbitrary accuracy nontrivial composite anyons. Instead of using the Solovay-Kitaev theorem, the sequences are based on a quantum algorithm for convergent search.
This review summarizes recent advances in our understanding of anomalous transport in spin chains, viewed through the lens of integrability. Numerical advances, based on tensor-network methods, have shown that transport in many canonical integrable spin chains -- most famously the Heisenberg model -- is anomalous. Concurrently, the framework of generalized hydrodynamics has been extended to explain some of the mechanisms underlying anomalous transport. We present what is currently understood about these mechanisms, and discuss how they resemble (and differ from) the mechanisms for anomalous transport in other contexts. We also briefly review potential transport anomalies in systems where integrability is an emergent or approximate property. We survey instances of anomalous transport and dynamics that remain to be understood.
The theory of quantum scarring -- a remarkable violation of quantum unique ergodicity -- rests on two complementary pillars: the existence of unstable classical periodic orbits and the so-called quasimodes, i.e., the non-ergodic states that strongly overlap with a small number of the systems eigenstates. Recently, interest in quantum scars has been revived in a many-body setting of Rydberg atom chains. While previous theoretical works have identified periodic orbits for such systems using time-dependent variational principle (TDVP), the link between periodic orbits and quasimodes has been missing. Here we provide a conceptually simple analytic construction of quasimodes for the non-integrable Rydberg atom model, and prove that they arise from a requantisation of previously established periodic orbits when quantum fluctuations are restored to all orders. Our results shed light on the TDVP classical system simultaneously playing the role of both the mean-field approximation and the systems classical limit, thus allowing us to firm up the analogy between the eigenstate scarring in the Rydberg atom chains and the single-particle quantum systems.
We numerically analyse the behavior of the full distribution of collective observables in quantum spin chains. While most of previous studies of quantum critical phenomena are limited to the first moments, here we demonstrate how quantum fluctuations at criticality lead to highly non-Gaussian distributions thus violating the central limit theorem. Interestingly, we show that the distributions for different system sizes collapse after scaling on the same curve for a wide range of transitions: first and second order quantum transitions and transitions of the Berezinskii-Kosterlitz-Thouless type. We propose and carefully analyse the feasibility of an experimental reconstruction of the distribution using light-matter interfaces for atoms in optical lattices or in optical resonators.