Quantum systems engineering

Abstract:

Polar molecules are an emerging platform for quantum technologies based on their long-range electric dipole–dipole interactions, which open new possibilities for quantum information processing and the quantum simulation of strongly correlated systems. Here, we use magnetic and microwave fields to design a fast entangling gate with > 0.999 fidelity and which is robust with respect to fluctuations in the trapping and control fields and to small thermal excitations. These results establish the feasibility to build a scalable quantum processor with a broad range of molecular species in optical-lattice and optical-tweezers setups.

Abstract:

© 2020 American Physical Society. Polar molecules are an emerging platform for quantum technologies based on their long-range electric dipole-dipole interactions, which open new possibilities for quantum information processing and the quantum simulation of strongly correlated systems. Here, we use magnetic and microwave fields to design a fast entangling gate with >0.999 fidelity and which is robust with respect to fluctuations in the trapping and control fields and to small thermal excitations. These results establish the feasibility to build a scalable quantum processor with a broad range of molecular species in optical-lattice and optical-tweezers setups.

Abstract:

We study an array of ultracold atoms in an optical lattice (Mott insulator) excited with a coherent ultrashort laser pulse to a state where single-electron wave functions spatially overlap. Beyond a threshold principal quantum number where Rydberg orbitals of neighboring lattice sites overlap with each other, the atoms efficiently undergo spontaneous Penning ionization resulting in a drastic change of ion-counting statistics, sharp increase of avalanche ionization, and the formation of an ultracold plasma. These observations signal the actual creation of electronic states with overlapping wave functions, which is further confirmed by a significant difference in ionization dynamics between a Bose-Einstein condensate and a Mott insulator. This system is a promising platform for simulating electronic many-body phenomena dominated by Coulomb interactions in the condensed phase.

Abstract:

We propose using ultracold fermionic atoms trapped in a periodically shaken optical lattice as a quantum simulator of the t−J Hamiltonian, which describes the dynamics in doped antiferromagnets and is thought to be relevant to the problem of high-temperature superconductivity in the cuprates. We show analytically that the effective Hamiltonian describing this system for off-resonant driving is the t−J model with additional pair hopping terms, whose parameters can all be controlled by the drive. We then demonstrate numerically using tensor network methods for a one-dimensional (1D) lattice that a slow modification of the driving strength allows near-adiabatic transfer of the system from the ground state of the underlying Hubbard model to the ground state of the effective t−J Hamiltonian. Finally, we report exact diagonalization calculations illustrating the control achievable on the dynamics of spin-singlet pairs in 2D lattices utilizing this technique with current cold-atom quantum-simulation technology. These results open new routes to explore the interplay between density and spin in strongly correlated fermionic systems through their out-of-equilibrium dynamics.

Abstract:

We study the null space degeneracy of open quantum systems with multiple non-abelian, strong symmetries. By decomposing the Hilbert space representation of these symmetries into an irreducible representation involving the direct sum of multiple, commuting, invariant subspaces we derive a tight lower bound for the stationary state degeneracy. We apply these results within the context of open quantum many-body systems, presenting three illustrative examples: a fully-connected quantum network, the XXX Heisenberg model and the Hubbard model. We find that the derived bound, which scales at least cubically in the system size the SU(2) symmetric cases, is often saturated. Moreover, our work provides a theory for the systematic block-decomposition of a Liouvillian with non-abelian symmetries, reducing the computational difficulty involved in diagonalising these objects and exposing a natural, physical structure to the steady states—which we observe in our examples.