No Arabic abstract
Trapped ions are a versatile platform for the investigation of quantum many-body phenomena, in particular for the study of scenarios where long-range interactions are mediated by phonons. Recent experiments have shown that the trapped ion platform can be augmented by exciting high-lying Rydberg states. This introduces controllable state-dependent interactions that are independent from the phonon structure. However, the many-body physics in this newly accessible regime is largely unexplored. We show that this system grants access to generalized Dicke model physics, where dipolar interactions between ions in Rydberg states drastically alter the collective non-equilibrium behavior. We analyze and classify the emerging dynamical phases and identify a host of non-equilibrium signatures such as multi-phase coexistence regions and phonon-lasing regimes. We moreover show how they can be detected and characterized through the fluorescence signal of scattered photons. Our study thus highlights new capabilities of trapped Rydberg ion systems for creating and detecting quantum non-equilibrium phases.
How a closed interacting quantum many-body system relaxes and dephases as a function of time is a fundamental question in thermodynamic and statistical physics. In this work, we analyse and observe the persistent temporal fluctuations after a quantum quench of a tunable long-range interacting transverse-field Ising Hamiltonian realized with a trapped-ion quantum simulator. We measure the temporal fluctuations in the average magnetization of a finite-size system of spin-$1/2$ particles. We experiment in a regime where the properties of the system are closely related to the integrable Hamiltonian with global spin-spin coupling, which enables analytical predictions even for the long-time non-integrable dynamics. The analytical expression for the temporal fluctuations predicts the exponential suppression of temporal fluctuations with increasing system size. Our measurement data is consistent with our theory predicting the regime of many-body dephasing.
Hybrid photonic-plasmonic nanostructures allow one to engineer coupling of quantum emitters and cavity modes accounting for the direct coherent and environment mediated dissipative pathways. Using generalized plasmonic Dicke model, we explore the non-equilibrium phase diagram with respect to these interactions. The analysis shows that their interplay results in the extension of the superradiant and regular lasing states to the dissipative coupling regime and an emergent lasing phase without population inversion having boundary with the superradiant and normal states. Calculated photon emission spectra are demonstrated to carry distinct signatures of these phases.
The collective and purely relaxational dynamics of quantum many-body systems after a quench at temperature $T=0$, from a disordered state to various phases is studied through the exact solution of the quantum Langevin equation of the spherical and the $O(n)$-model in the limit $ntoinfty$. The stationary state of the quantum dynamics is shown to be a non-equilibrium state. The quantum spherical and the quantum $O(n)$-model for $ntoinfty$ are in the same dynamical universality class. The long-time behaviour of single-time and two-time correlation and response functions is analysed and the universal exponents which characterise quantum coarsening and quantum ageing are derived. The importance of the non-Markovian long-time memory of the quantum noise is elucidated by comparing it with an effective Markovian noise having the same scaling behaviour and with the case of non-equilibrium classical dynamics.
Quantum computers and simulators may offer significant advantages over their classical counterparts, providing insights into quantum many-body systems and possibly improving performance for solving exponentially hard problems, such as optimization and satisfiability. Here we report the implementation of a low-depth Quantum Approximate Optimization Algorithm (QAOA) using an analog quantum simulator. We estimate the ground state energy of the Transverse Field Ising Model with long-range interactions with tunable range and we optimize the corresponding combinatorial classical problem by sampling the QAOA output with high-fidelity, single-shot individual qubit measurements. We execute the algorithm with both an exhaustive search and closed-loop optimization of the variational parameters, approximating the ground state energy with up to 40 trapped-ion qubits. We benchmark the experiment with bootstrapping heuristic methods scaling polynomially with the system size. We observe, in agreement with numerics, that the QAOA performance does not degrade significantly as we scale up the system size, and that the runtime is approximately independent from the number of qubits. We finally give a comprehensive analysis of the errors occurring in our system, a crucial step in the path forward towards the application of the QAOA to more general problem instances.
Conical intersections between electronic potential energy surfaces are paradigmatic for the study of non-adiabatic processes in the excited states of large molecules. However, since the corresponding dynamics occurs on a femtosecond timescale, their investigation remains challenging and requires ultrafast spectroscopy techniques. We demonstrate that trapped Rydberg ions are a platform to engineer conical intersections and to simulate their ensuing dynamics on larger length and time scales of the order of nanometers and microseconds, respectively; all this in a highly controllable system. Here, the shape of the potential energy surfaces and the position of the conical intersection can be tuned thanks to the interplay between the high polarizability and the strong dipolar exchange interactions of Rydberg ions. We study how the presence of a conical intersection affects both the nuclear and electronic dynamics demonstrating, in particular, how it results in the inhibition of the nuclear motion. These effects can be monitored in real-time via a direct spectroscopic measurement of the electronic populations in a state-of-the-art experimental setup.