No Arabic abstract
We analyze the propagation of quantum states in the presence of weak disorder. In particular, we investigate the reliable transmittance of quantum states, as potential carriers of quantum information, through disorder-perturbed waveguides. We quantify wave-packet distortion, backscattering, and disorder-induced dephasing, which all act detrimentally on transport, and identify conditions for reliable transmission. Our analysis relies on the treatment of the nonequilibrium dynamics of ensemble-averaged quantum states in terms of quantum master equations.
The transport of excitations governs fundamental properties of matter. Particularly rich physics emerges in the interplay between disorder and environmental noise, even in small systems such as photosynthetic biomolecules. Counterintuitively, noise can enhance coherent quantum transport, which has been proposed as a mechanism behind the high transport efficiencies observed in photosynthetic complexes. This effect has been called environmental-assisted quantum transport (ENAQT). Here, we propose a quantum simulation of the excitation transport in an open quantum network, taking advantage of the high controllability of current trapped-ion experiments. Our scheme allows for the controlled study of various different aspects of the excitation transfer, ranging from the influence of static disorder and interaction range, over the effect of Markovian and non-Markovian dephasing, to the impact of a continuous insertion of excitations. Our proposal discusses experimental error sources and realistic parameters, showing that it can be implemented in state-of-the-art ion-chain experiments.
In this communication, we numerically studied disordered quantum transport in a quantum anomalous Hall insulator-superconductor junction based on the effective edge model approach. In particular, we focus on the parameter regime with the free mean path due to elastic scattering much smaller than the sample size and discuss disordered transport behaviors in the presence of different numbers of chiral edge modes, as well as non-chiral metallic modes. Our numerical results demonstrate that the presence of multiple chiral edge modes or non-chiral metallic modes will lead to a strong Andreev conversion, giving rise to half-electron half-hole transmission through the junction structure, in sharp contrast to the suppression of Andreev conversion in the single chiral edge mode case. Our results suggest the importance of additional transport modes in the quantum anomalous Hall insulator-superconductor junction and will guide the future transport measurements.
We explore a small quantum refrigerator in which the working substance is made of paradigmatic nearest neighbor quantum spin models, the XYZ and the XY model with Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya interactions, consisting of two and three spins, each of which is in contact with a bosonic bath. We identify a specific range of interaction strengths which can be tuned appropriately to ensure a cooling of the selected spin in terms of its local temperature in the weak coupling limit. Moreover, we report that in this domain, when one of the interaction strengths is disordered, the performance of the thermal machine operating as a refrigerator remains almost unchanged instead of degradation, thereby establishing the flexibility of this device. However, to obtain a significant amount of cooling via ordered as well as disordered spin models, we observe that one has to go beyond weak coupling limit and compute the figures of merits by using global master equations.
Understanding the dynamics of strongly interacting disordered quantum systems is one of the most challenging problems in modern science, due to features such as the breakdown of thermalization and the emergence of glassy phases of matter. We report on the observation of anomalous relaxation dynamics in an isolated XXZ quantum spin system realized by an ultracold gas of atoms initially prepared in a superposition of two-different Rydberg states. The total magnetization is found to exhibit sub-exponential relaxation analogous to classical glassy dynamics, but in the quantum case this relaxation originates from the build-up of non-classical correlations. In both experiment and semi-classical simulations, we find the evolution towards a randomized state is independent of the strength of disorder up to a critical value. This hints towards a unifying description of relaxation dynamics in disordered isolated quantum systems, analogous to the generalization of statistical mechanics to out-of-equilibrium scenarios in classical spin glasses.
We study the out-of-equilibrium dynamics in the quantum Ising model with power-law interactions and positional disorder. For arbitrary dimension $d$ and interaction range $alpha geq d$ we analytically find a stretched exponential decay of the global magnetization and ensemble-averaged single-spin purity with a stretch-power $beta = d/alpha$ in the thermodynamic limit. Numerically, we confirm that glassy behavior persists for finite system sizes and sufficiently strong disorder. We identify dephasing between disordered coherent pairs as the main mechanism leading to a relaxation of global magnetization, whereas genuine many-body interactions lead to a loss of single-spin purity which signifies the build-up of entanglement. The emergence of glassy dynamics in the quantum Ising model extends prior findings in classical and open quantum systems, where the stretched exponential law is explained by a scale-invariant distribution of time scales, to both integrable and non-integrable quantum systems.