@article {3358, title = {Non-equilibrium critical scaling and universality in a quantum simulator}, year = {2023}, month = {9/19/2023}, abstract = {

Universality and scaling laws are hallmarks of equilibrium phase transitions and critical phenomena. However, extending these concepts to non-equilibrium systems is an outstanding challenge. Despite recent progress in the study of dynamical phases, the universality classes and scaling laws for non-equilibrium phenomena are far less understood than those in equilibrium. In this work, using a trapped-ion quantum simulator with single-ion resolution, we investigate the non-equilibrium nature of critical fluctuations following a quantum quench to the critical point. We probe the scaling of spin fluctuations after a series of quenches to the critical Hamiltonian of a long-range Ising model. With systems of up to 50 spins, we show that the amplitude and timescale of the post-quench fluctuations scale with system size with distinct universal critical exponents. While a generic quench can lead to thermal critical behaviour, we find that a second quench from one critical state to another (i.e. a double quench) results in critical behaviour that does not have an equilibrium counterpart. Our results demonstrate the ability of quantum simulators to explore universal scaling beyond the equilibrium paradigm.

}, url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2309.10856}, author = {A. De and P. Cook and K. Collins and W. Morong and D. Paz and P. Titum and G. Pagano and Alexey V. Gorshkov and M. Maghrebi and C. Monroe} } @article {2520, title = {Observation of Domain Wall Confinement and Dynamics in a Quantum Simulator}, year = {2019}, month = {12/23/2019}, abstract = {

Confinement is a ubiquitous mechanism in nature, whereby particles feel an attractive force that increases without bound as they separate. A prominent example is color confinement in particle physics, in which baryons and mesons are produced by quark confinement. Analogously, confinement can also occur in low-energy quantum many-body systems when elementary excitations are confined into bound quasiparticles. Here, we report the first observation of magnetic domain wall confinement in interacting spin chains with a trapped-ion quantum simulator. By measuring how correlations spread, we show that confinement can dramatically suppress information propagation and thermalization in such many-body systems. We are able to quantitatively determine the excitation energy of domain wall bound states from non-equilibrium quench dynamics. Furthermore, we study the number of domain wall excitations created for different quench parameters, in a regime that is difficult to model with classical computers. This work demonstrates the capability of quantum simulators for investigating exotic high-energy physics phenomena, such as quark collision and string breaking

}, url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/1912.11117}, author = {W. L. Tan and P. Becker and F. Liu and G. Pagano and K. S. Collins and A. De and L. Feng and H. B. Kaplan and A. Kyprianidis and R. Lundgren and W. Morong and S. Whitsitt and Alexey V. Gorshkov and C. Monroe} } @article {2410, title = {Quantum Approximate Optimization with a Trapped-Ion Quantum Simulator}, year = {2019}, month = {06/06/2019}, abstract = {

Quantum computers and simulators may offer significant advantages over their classical counterparts, providing insights into quantum many-body systems and possibly solving exponentially hard problems, such as optimization and satisfiability. Here we report the first implementation of a shallow-depth Quantum Approximate Optimization Algorithm (QAOA) using an analog quantum simulator to estimate the ground state energy of the transverse field Ising model with tunable long-range interactions. First, we exhaustively search the variational control parameters to approximate the ground state energy with up to 40 trapped-ion qubits. We then interface the quantum simulator with a classical algorithm to more efficiently find the optimal set of parameters that minimizes the resulting energy of the system. We finally sample from the full probability distribution of the QAOA output with single-shot and efficient measurements of every qubit.\ 

}, url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/1906.02700}, author = {G. Pagano and A. Bapat and P. Becker and K. S. Collins and A. De and P. W. Hess and H. B. Kaplan and A. Kyprianidis and W. L. Tan and Christopher L. Baldwin and L. T. Brady and A. Deshpande and F. Liu and S. Jordan and Alexey V. Gorshkov and C. Monroe} }