Lingzhen Guo

In recent years, dynamical phase transitions and out-of-equilibrium criticality have been at the forefront of ultracold gases and condensed matter research. Whereas universality and scaling are established topics in equilibrium quantum many-body physics, out-of-equilibrium extensions of such concepts still leave much to be desired. Using exact diagonalization and the time-dependent variational principle in uniform martrix product states, we calculate the time evolution of the local order parameter and Loschmidt return rate in transverse-field Ising chains with antiferromagnetic power law-decaying interactions, and map out the corresponding rich dynamical phase diagram. \textit{Anomalous} cusps in the return rate, which are ubiquitous at small quenches within the ordered phase in the case of ferromagnetic long-range interactions, are absent within the accessible timescales of our simulations in the antiferromagnetic case, showing that long-range interactions are not a sufficient condition for their appearance. We attribute this to much weaker domain-wall binding in the antiferromagnetic case. For quenches across the quantum critical point, \textit{regular} cusps appear in the return rate and connect to the local order parameter changing sign, indicating the concurrence of two major concepts of dynamical phase transitions. Our results consolidate conclusions of previous works that a necessary condition for the appearance of anomalous cusps in the return rate after quenches within the ordered phase is for topologically trivial local spin flips to be the energetically dominant excitations in the spectrum of the quench Hamiltonian. Our findings are readily accessible in modern trapped-ion setups, and we outline the associated experimental considerations.

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.

We propose a scalable ion trap architecture for universal quantum computation, which is composed of an array of ion traps with one ion confined in each trap. The neighboring traps are designed capable of merging into one single trap. The universal two-qubit $\sqrt{SWAP}$ gate is realized by direct collision of two neighboring ions in the merged trap, which induces an effective spin-spin interaction between two ions. We find that the collision-induced spin-spin interaction decreases with the third power of two ions' trapping distance. Even with a $200\ μm$ trapping distance between atomic ions in Paul traps, it is still possible to realize a two-qubit gate operation with speed in $0.1\ kHz$ regime. The speed can be further increased up into $0.1\ MHz$ regime using electrons with $10\ mm$ trapping distance in Penning traps.

A novel way to create a band structure of the quasienergy spectrum for driven systems is proposed based on the discrete symmetry in phase space. The system, e.g., an ion or ultracold atom trapped in a potential, shows no spatial periodicity, but it is driven by a time-dependent field coupling highly nonlinearly to one of its degrees of freedom (e.g., ~ q^n). The band structure in quasienergy arises as a consequence of the n-fold discrete periodicity in phase space induced by this driving field. We propose an explicit model to realize such a phase space crystal and analyze its band structure in the frame of a tight-binding approximation. The phase space crystal opens new ways to engineer energy band structures, with the added advantage that its properties can be changed in situ by tuning the driving field's parameters.