326,990 research outputs found

    Spacetime as a quantum many-body system

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    Quantum gravity has become a fertile interface between gravitational physics and quantum many-body physics, with its double goal of identifying the microscopic constituents of the universe and their fundamental dynamics, and of understanding their collective properties and how spacetime and geometry themselves emerge from them at macroscopic scales. In this brief contribution, we outline the problem of quantum gravity from this emergent spacetime perspective, and discuss some examples in which ideas and methods from quantum many-body systems have found a central role in quantum gravity research.Comment: 15 pages; invited contribution to "Many-body approaches at different scales: A tribute to Norman H. March on the occasion of his 90th birthday", edited by G. G. N. Angilella and C. Amovilli (New York, Springer, 2017 - to appear

    Scrambling and thermalization in a diffusive quantum many-body system

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    Out-of-time ordered (OTO) correlation functions describe scrambling of information in correlated quantum matter. They are of particular interest in incoherent quantum systems lacking well defined quasi-particles. Thus far, it is largely elusive how OTO correlators spread in incoherent systems with diffusive transport governed by a few globally conserved quantities. Here, we study the dynamical response of such a system using high-performance matrix-product-operator techniques. Specifically, we consider the non-integrable, one-dimensional Bose-Hubbard model in the incoherent high-temperature regime. Our system exhibits diffusive dynamics in time-ordered correlators of globally conserved quantities, whereas OTO correlators display a ballistic, light-cone spreading of quantum information. The slowest process in the global thermalization of the system is thus diffusive, yet information spreading is not inhibited by such slow dynamics. We furthermore develop an experimentally feasible protocol to overcome some challenges faced by existing proposals and to probe time-ordered and OTO correlation functions. Our study opens new avenues for both the theoretical and experimental exploration of thermalization and information scrambling dynamics.Comment: 7+4 pages, 8+3 figures; streamlined versio

    Quantum invariants of motion in a generic many-body system

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    Dynamical Lie-algebraic method for the construction of local quantum invariants of motion in non-integrable many-body systems is proposed and applied to a simple but generic toy model, namely an infinite kicked t−Vt-V chain of spinless fermions. Transition from integrable via {pseudo-integrable (\em intermediate}) to quantum ergodic (quantum mixing) regime in parameter space is investigated. Dynamical phase transition between ergodic and intermediate (neither ergodic nor completely integrable) regime in thermodynamic limit is proposed. Existence or non-existence of local conservation laws corresponds to intermediate or ergodic regime, respectively. The computation of time-correlation functions of typical observables by means of local conservation laws is found fully consistent with direct calculations on finite systems.Comment: 4 pages in REVTeX with 5 eps figures include

    Coherent Imaging Spectroscopy of a Quantum Many-Body Spin System

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    Quantum simulators, in which well controlled quantum systems are used to reproduce the dynamics of less understood ones, have the potential to explore physics that is inaccessible to modeling with classical computers. However, checking the results of such simulations will also become classically intractable as system sizes increase. In this work, we introduce and implement a coherent imaging spectroscopic technique to validate a quantum simulation, much as magnetic resonance imaging exposes structure in condensed matter. We use this method to determine the energy levels and interaction strengths of a fully-connected quantum many-body system. Additionally, we directly measure the size of the critical energy gap near a quantum phase transition. We expect this general technique to become an important verification tool for quantum simulators once experiments advance beyond proof-of-principle demonstrations and exceed the resources of conventional computers
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