No Arabic abstract
We study the dynamics of the Bogoliubov wave packet in superconductors and calculate the supercurrent carried by the wave packet. We discover an anomalous contribution to the supercurrent, related to the quantum metric of the Bloch wave function. This anomalous contribution is most important for flat or quasiflat bands, as exemplified by the attractive Hubbard models on the Creutz ladder and sawtooth lattice. Our theoretical framework is general and can be used to study a wide variety of phenomena, such as spin transport and exciton transport.
The single-particle excitations of a superconductor are coherent superpositions of electrons and holes near the Fermi level, called Bogoliubov quasiparticles. They are Majorana fermions, meaning that pairs of quasiparticles can annihilate. We calculate the annihilation probability at a beam splitter for chiral quantum Hall edge states, obtaining a 1 +/- cos phi dependence on the phase difference phi of the superconductors from which the excitations originated (with the +/- sign distinguishing singlet and triplet pairing). This provides for a nonlocal measurement of the superconducting phase in the absence of any supercurrent.
We consider two-body bound states in a flat band of a multiband system. The existence of pair dispersion predicts the possibility of breaking the degeneracy of the band and creating order, such as superconductivity. Within a separable interaction potential approximation, we find that finiteness of the effective mass of a bound pair is determined by a band structure invariant, which in the uniform case becomes the quantum metric. The results offer a simple foundation to understand and predict flat band superconductivity. We propose an experiment to test the interaction-induced pair motion.
Extending the qubit coherence times is a crucial task in building quantum information processing devices. In the three-dimensional cavity implementations of circuit QED, the coherence of superconducting qubits was improved dramatically due to cutting the losses associated with the photon emission. Next frontier in improving the coherence includes the mitigation of the adverse effects of superconducting quasiparticles. In these lectures, we review the basics of the quasiparticles dynamics, their interaction with the qubit degree of freedom, their contribution to the qubit relaxation rates, and approaches to control their effect.
We study the quench dynamics of a topological $p$-wave superfluid with two competing order parameters, $Delta_pm(t)$. When the system is prepared in the $p+ip$ ground state and the interaction strength is quenched, only $Delta_+(t)$ is nonzero. However, we show that fluctuations in the initial conditions result in the growth of $Delta_-(t)$ and chaotic oscillations of both order parameters. We term this behavior phase III. In addition, there are two other types of late time dynamics -- phase I where both order parameters decay to zero and phase II where $Delta_+(t)$ asymptotes to a nonzero constant while $Delta_-(t)$ oscillates near zero. Although the model is nonintegrable, we are able to map out the exact phase boundaries in parameter space. Interestingly, we find phase III is unstable with respect to breaking the time reversal symmetry of the interaction. When one of the order parameters is favored in the Hamiltonian, the other one rapidly vanishes and the previously chaotic phase III is replaced by the Floquet topological phase III that is seen in the integrable chiral $p$-wave model.
We investigate the wavepacket spreading after a single spin flip in prototypical two-dimensional ferromagnetic and antiferromagnetic quantum spin systems. We find characteristic spatial magnon density profiles: While the ferromagnet shows a square-shaped pattern reflecting the underlying lattice structure, as exhibited by quantum walkers, the antiferromagnet shows a circular-shaped pattern which hides the lattice structure and instead resembles a classical wave pattern. We trace these fundamentally different behaviors back to the distinctly different magnon energy-momentum dispersion relations and also provide a real-space interpretation. Our findings point to new opportunities for real-time, real-space imaging of quantum magnets both in materials science and in quantum simulators.