Quantum systems engineering

Abstract:

The out-of-equilibrium dynamics of quantum systems is one of the most fascinating problems in physics, with outstanding open questions on issues such as relaxation to equilibrium. An area of particular interest concerns few-body systems, where quantum and thermal fluctuations are expected to be especially relevant. In this contribution, we present numerical results demonstrating the impact of conserved quantities (or ‘charges’) in the outcomes of out-of-equilibrium measurements starting from realistic equilibrium states on a few-body system implementing the Dicke model.

Abstract:

We use state-of-the-art density matrix renormalization group calculations in the canonical ensemble to determine the phase diagram of the dipolar Bose-Hubbard model on a finite cylinder. We consider several observables that are accessible in typical optical lattice setups and assess how well these quantities perform as order parameters. We find that, especially for small systems, the occupation imbalance is less susceptible to boundary effects than the structure factor in uncovering the presence of a periodic density modulation. By analyzing the nonlocal correlations, we find that the appearance of supersolid order is very sensitive to boundary effects, which may render it difficult to observe in quantum gas lattice experiments with a few tens of particles. Finally, we show that density measurements readily obtainable on a quantum gas microscope allow distinguishing between superfluid and solid phases using unsupervised machine-learning techniques.

Abstract:

We show that nonlinear problems including nonlinear partial di↵erential equations can be e- ciently solved by variational quantum computing. We achieve this by utilizing multiple copies of variational quantum states to treat nonlinearities eciently and by introducing tensor networks as a programming paradigm. The key concepts of the algorithm are demonstrated for the nonlinear Schr¨odinger equation as a canonical example. We numerically show that the variational quantum ansatz can be exponentially more ecient than matrix product states and present experimental proof-of-principle results obtained on an IBM Q device.