Sara Murciano

The non-equilibrium physics of many-body quantum systems harbors various unconventional phenomena. In this study, we experimentally investigate one of the most puzzling of these phenomena -- the quantum Mpemba effect, where a tilted ferromagnet restores its symmetry more rapidly when it is farther from the symmetric state compared to when it is closer. We present the first experimental evidence of the occurrence of this effect in a trapped-ion quantum simulator. The symmetry breaking and restoration are monitored through entanglement asymmetry, probed via randomized measurements, and postprocessed using the classical shadows technique. Our findings are further substantiated by measuring the Frobenius distance between the experimental state and the stationary thermal symmetric theoretical state, offering direct evidence of subsystem thermalization.

The study of the moments of the partially transposed density matrix provides a new and effective way of detecting bipartite entanglement in a many-body mixed state. This is valuable for cold-atom and ion-trap experiments, as well as in the general context of quantum simulation of many-body systems. In this work we study the time evolution after a quantum quench of the moments of the partial transpose, and several related quantities, such as the Rényi negativities. By combining Conformal Field Theory (CFT) results with integrability, we show that, in the space-time scaling limit of long times and large subsystems, a quasiparticle description allows for a complete understanding of the Rényi negativities. We test our analytical predictions against exact numerical results for free-fermion and free-boson lattice models, even though our framework applies to generic interacting integrable systems.