Using the Husimi function, we investigate the phase space signatures of the excited state quantum phase transitions (ESQPTs) in the Lipkin and coupled top models. We show that the time evolution of the Husimi function exhibits distinct behaviors between the different phases of an ESQPT and the presence of an ESQPT is signaled by the particular dynamics of the Husimi function. We also evaluate the long time averaged Husimi function and its associated marginal distributions, and discuss how to identify the signatures of ESQPT from their properties. Moreover, by exploiting the second moment and Wherl entropy of the long-time averaged Husimi function, we estimate the critical points of ESQPTs, demonstrating a good agreement with the analytical results. We thus provide further evidence that the phase space methods is a valuable tool for the studies of phase transitions and also open a new way to detect ESQPTs.
We study a heavy-heavy-light three-body system confined to one space dimension provided the binding energy of an excited state in the heavy-light subsystems approaches zero. The associated two-body system is characterized by (i) the structure of the weakly-bound excited heavy-light state and (ii) the presence of deeply-bound heavy-light states. The consequences of these aspects for the behavior of the three-body system are analyzed. We find strong indication for universal behavior of both three-body binding energies and wave functions for different weakly-bound excited states in the heavy-ligh…
The three-body Casimir-Polder potential between one excited and two ground-state atoms is evaluated. A physical model based on the dressed field correlations of vacuum fluctuations is used, generalizing a model previously introduced for three ground-state atoms. Although the three-body potential with one excited atom is already known in the literature, our model gives new insights on the nature of non-additive Casimir-Polder forces with one or more excited atoms.
One-dimensional (1D) subwavelength atom arrays display multiply excited subradiant eigenstates which are reminiscent of free fermions. So far, these states have been associated with subradiant states with decay rates $\propto N^{-3}$, with N the number of atoms, which fundamentally prevents detection of their fermionic features by optical means. In this Letter, we show that free-fermion states generally appear whenever the band of singly excited states has a quadratic dispersion relation at the band edge and, hence, may also be obtained with radiant and even superradiant states. 1D arrays have…
We present a formula for the body-assisted van der Waals interaction potential between two atoms, one or both being prepared in an excited energy eigenstate. The presence of arbitrary arrangement for material environment is taken into account via the Green function. The resulting formula supports one of two conflicting findings recorded. The consistency of our formula is investigated by applying it for the case of two atoms in free space and comparing the resulting expression with the one found from the limiting Casimir-Polder potential between an excited atom and a small dielectric sphere.
We study the collective excitation of a gas of highly excited atoms confined to a large spacing ring lattice, where the ground and the excited states are coupled resonantly via a laser field. Our attention is focused on the regime where the interaction between the highly excited atoms is very weak in comparison to the Rabi frequency of the laser. We demonstrate that in this case the many-body excitations of the system can be expressed in terms of free spinless fermions. The complex many-particle states arising in this regime are characterized and their properties, e.g. their correlation functi…
Free classical particles have well-defined momentum and position, while free quantum particles have well-defined momentum but a position fully delocalized over the sample volume. We develop a many-body formalism based on wave-packet operators that connects these two limits, the thermal energy being distributed between the state spatial extension and its thermal excitation. The corresponding `mixed quantum-classical' states, which render the Boltzmann operator diagonal, are the physically relevant states when the temperature is finite. The formulation of many-body Hamiltonians in terms of these…
We demonstrate a break-down in the macroscopic (classical-like) dynamics of wave-packets in complex microscopic and mesoscopic collisions. This break-down manifests itself in coherent superpositions of the rotating clockwise and anticlockwise wave-packets in the regime of strongly overlapping many-body resonances of the highly-excited intermediate complex. These superpositions involve $\sim 10^4$ many-body configurations so that their internal interactive complexity dramatically exceeds all of those previously discussed and experimentally realized. The interference fringes persist over a time-…
As a measure of information scrambling and quantum chaos, out-of-time-ordered correlator (OTOC) plays more and more important role in many different fields of physics. In this work, we verify that the OTOC can also be used as a prober of the excited-state quantum phase transition (ESQPT) in a quantum many body system. By using the exact diagonalization method, we examine the dynamical properties of OTOC in the Lipkin model, which undergoes an ESQPT. We demonstrate that the OTOC exhibits a remarkable distinct evolution behaviors in different phases of ESQPT. Therefore, the presence of an ESQPT …
The problem of nonlocality in the dynamical three-body Casimir-Polder interaction between an initially excited and two ground-state atoms is considered. It is shown that the nonlocal spatial correlations of the field emitted by the excited atom during the initial part of its spontaneous decay may become manifest in the three-body interaction. The observability of this new phenomenon is discussed.
We analyze the decoherence induced on a single qubit by the interaction with a two-level boson system with critical internal dynamics. We explore how the decoherence process is affected by the presence of quantum phase transitions in the environment. We conclude that the dynamics of the qubit changes dramatically when the environment passes through a continuous excited state quantum phase transition. If the system-environment coupling energy equals the energy at which the environment has a critical behavior, the decoherence induced on the qubit is maximal and the fidelity tends to zero with fi…
We investigate the collective aspects of Rydberg excitation in ultracold mesoscopic systems. Strong interactions between Rydberg atoms influence the excitation process and impose correlations between excited atoms. The manifestations of the collective behavior of Rydberg excitation are the many-body Rabi oscillations, spatial correlations between atoms as well as the fluctuations of the number of excited atoms. We study these phenomena in detail by numerically solving the many-body Schrëdinger equation.
Phenomena analogous to ground state quantum phase transitions have recently been noted to occur among states throughout the excitation spectra of certain many-body models. These excited state phase transitions are manifested as simultaneous singularities in the eigenvalue spectrum (including the gap or level density), order parameters, and wave function properties. In this article, the characteristics of excited state quantum phase transitions are investigated. The finite-size scaling behavior is determined at the mean field level. It is found that excited state quantum phase transitions are u…
Due to the experimental time constraints of state of the art quantum simulations with trapped ions, the direct preparation of the ground state by adiabatically ramping the field of a transverse field Ising model becomes more and more difficult as the number of particles increase. We propose a spectroscopy protocol that intentionally creates excitations through diabatic ramping of the transverse field and measures a low-noise observable as a function of time for a constant field to reveal the structure of the coherent dynamics of the resulting many-body states. To simulate the experimental data…
We present an extension of the time-dependent Density Matrix Renormalization Group (t-DMRG), also known as Time Evolving Block Decimation algorithm (TEBD), allowing for the computation of dynamically important excited states of one-dimensional many-body systems. We show its practical use for analyzing the dynamical properties and excitations of the Bose-Hubbard model describing ultracold atoms loaded in an optical lattice from a Bose-Einstein condensate. This allows for a deeper understanding of nonadiabaticity in experimental realizations of insulating phases.
Multi-particle interference is an essential ingredient for fundamental quantum mechanics phenomena and for quantum information processing to provide a computational advantage, as recently emphasized by Boson Sampling experiments. Hence, developing a reliable and efficient technique to witness its presence is pivotal towards the practical implementation of quantum technologies. Here we experimentally identify genuine many-body quantum interference via a recent efficient protocol, which exploits statistical signatures at the output of a multimode quantum device. We successfully apply the test to…
We study the excitation redistribution from cesium $7\mathrm{P}_{1/2}$ or $7\mathrm{P}_{3/2}$ to neighboring energy levels by Black Body Radiation (BBR) and inter atomic collisions using pump-probe spectroscopy inside a vapor cell. At low vapor densities we measure redistribution of the initial, velocity-selected, atomic excitation by BBR. This preserves the selected atomic velocities allowing us to perform high resolution spectroscopy of the $\mathrm{6D\rightarrow 7F}$ transitions. This transfer mechanism could also be used to perform sub-Doppler spectroscopy of the cesium highly-excited $\ma…
Excited state quantum phase transitions (ESQPTs) are generalizations of quantum phase transitions (QPTs) to excited levels. They are associated with local divergences in the density of states. Here, we investigate how the presence of an ESQPT can be detected from the analysis of the structure of the Hamiltonian matrix, the level of localization of the eigenstates, the onset of bifurcation, and the speed of the system evolution. Our findings are illustrated for a Hamiltonian with infinite-range Ising interaction in a transverse field. This is a version of the Lipkin-Meshkov-Glick (LMG) model an…
Non-equilibrium physics including many-body localization (MBL) has attracted increasing attentions, but theoretical approaches of reliably studying non-equilibrium properties remain quite limited. In this Letter, we propose a systematic approach to probe MBL phases via the excited-state variational quantum eigensolver (VQE) and demonstrate convincing results of MBL on a quantum hardware, which we believe paves a promising way for future simulations of non-equilibrium systems beyond the reach of classical computations in the noisy intermediate-scale quantum (NISQ) era. Moreover, the MBL probing…
Many-body phenomena far from equilibrium present challenges beyond reach by classical computational resources. Digital quantum computers provide a possible way forward but noise limits their use in the near-term. We propose a scheme to simulate and characterize many-body Floquetsystems hosting a rich variety of phases that operates with a shallow depth circuit. Starting from a "clean" periodic circuit that simulates the dynamical evolution of a Floquet system, we introduce quasi-periodicity to the circuit parameters to prevent thermalization by introducing many-body localization. By inspecting…
Reinforcement Learning Assisted Quantum Simulation of Many-Body Excited States and Real-Time Dynamics
School of Optical Information and Energy Engineering, Wuhan Institute of Technology（武汉工程大学光电信息与能源工程学院）；Zhejiang Laboratory（浙江实验室）；IQM Quantum Computers（IQM量子计算机）
Artificial neural networks have been recently introduced as a general ansatz to compactly represent many- body wave functions. In conjunction with Variational Monte Carlo, this ansatz has been applied to find Hamil- tonian ground states and their energies. Here we provide extensions of this method to study properties of ex- cited states, a central task in several many-body quantum calculations. First, we give a prescription that allows to target eigenstates of a (nonlocal) symmetry of the Hamiltonian. Second, we give an algorithm that allows to compute low-lying excited states without symmetri…
We observe enhanced three-body recombination in an ultracold three-component $^6$Li Fermi gas with large but unequal scattering lengths attributable to an excited Efimov trimer state near the three-atom scattering threshold. We find excellent agreement between the measured three-body recombination rate and the recombination rate calculated in the zero-range approximation where the only free parameters are the Efimov parameters $κ_*$ and $η_*$. The value of $κ_*$ determined by the location of the Efimov resonance we observe at 895 G also predicts the locations of loss features previously observ…
The dynamics of bosons in generic multimode systems, such as Bose-Hubbard models, is not only determined by interactions among the particles, but also by their mutual indistinguishability manifested in many-particle interference. We introduce a measure of indistinguishability for Fock states of bosons whose mutual distinguishability is controlled by an internal degree of freedom. We demonstrate how this measure emerges both in the non-interacting and interacting evolution of observables. In particular, we find an unambiguous relationship between our measure and the variance of single-particle …
A pair of coherent femtosecond pulse excitations applied to a molecule with strong electron-phonon coupling creates a coherent superposition of a low momentum and a high momentum wavepacket in the vibrational states of both the excited state and the ground state of the coherent transition. As the excited state is accelerated further, interference between the high momentum ground state contribution and the low momentum excited state contribution causes a photon echo. This photon echo is a direct consequence of quantum interference between separate vibrational trajectories and can therefore prov…
We explore the possibility to perform symmetry restoration with the variation after projection technique on a quantum computer followed by additional post-processing. The final goal is to develop configuration interaction techniques based on many-body trial states pre-optimized on a quantum computer. We show how the projection method used for symmetry restoration can prepare optimized states that could then be employed as initial states for quantum or hybrid quantum-classical algorithms. We use the quantum phase estimation and quantum Krylov approaches for the post-processing. The latter metho…
We study the time evolution of an initially excited many-body state in a finite system of interacting Fermi-particles in the situation when the interaction gives rise to the ``chaotic'' structure of compound states. This situation is generic for highly excited many-particle states in quantum systems, such as heavy nuclei, complex atoms, quantum dots, spin systems, and quantum computers. For a strong interaction the leading term for the return probability $W(t)$ has the form $W(t)\simeq \exp (-Δ_E^2t^2)$ with $Δ_E^2$ as the variance of the strength function. The conventional exponential linear …
We explore the use of short-range entanglement measures, such as concurrence and negativity, and global entanglement measures such as geometric entanglement, as indicators of many-body localization (MBL) in the spectra of disordered spin systems. From the perspective of entanglement monogamy, the two types of entanglement behave oppositely in the thermalized and MBL phases. In a recent work, the concurrence of subsystems, a measure of local entanglement, was used in a study of many-body localization in a one-dimensional spin-$1/2$ system (Bera and Lakshminarayan, 2016). We show numerically tha…
The collective emission from a one-dimensional chain of interacting two-level atoms is investigated. We calculate the light scattered by dissipative few-excitation eigenstates in the far-field, and in particular focus on signatures of a lattice two-body bound state. We present analytical results for the angle-resolved, temporal decay of the scattered light intensity. Moreover, we find that the steady-state emission spectrum that emerges when the system is probed by a weak, incoherent driving field exhibits a distinct signature for the existence of a bound state, and allows to determine the mom…
We compute concurrence, a measure of bipartite entanglement, of the first excited state of the $1$-D Heisenberg frustrated $J_1$-$J_2$ spin-chain and observe a sudden change in the entanglement of the eigen state near the coupling strength $α=J_2/J_1\approx0.241$, where a quantum phase transition from spin-fluid phase to dimer phase has been previously reported. We numerically observe this phenomena for spin-chain with $8$ sites to $16$ sites, and the value of $α$ at which the change in entanglement is observed asymptotically tends to a value $α_c\approx0.24116$. We have calculated the finite-…
We study the excitation spectrum of a family of transverse-field spin chain models with variable interaction range and arbitrary spin $S$, which in the case of $S=1/2$ interpolates between the Lipkin-Meshkov-Glick and the Ising model. For any finite number $N$ of spins, a semiclassical energy manifold is derived in the large-$S$ limit employing bosonization methods, and its geometry is shown to determine not only the leading-order term but also the higher-order quantum fluctuations. Based on a multi-configurational mean-field ansatz, we obtain the semiclassical backbone of the quantum spectrum…
Fano interferences in nanostructures are influenced by dissipation effects as well as many-body interactions. Two dimensional coherent spectroscopies have just begun to be applied to these systems where the spectroscopic signatures of a discrete-continuum structure are not known. In this article we calculate the excited-state absorption contribution for different models of higher-lying excited states. We find that the characteristic asymmetry of one-dimensional spectroscopies is recovered from the many-body contributions, and that the higher-lying excited manifolds have distorted lineshapes th…
Matter wave revivals depend on a delicate interplay of constructive many-body quantum interferences in the developing dynamics of an ultracold bosonic system in an optical lattice. It is shown that the interplay between weak intersite tunneling and strong onsite interactions can lead to the quantum dynamics of a density wave displaying several features not found in the mean-field limit: occupancy oscillations, resurgent revivals, and a (anti-) synchronization of revival peaks and occupancy oscillation peaks. This implies cooperative interference effects that alternate between constructive and …
We study the spontaneous decay of an impurity coupled to a linear array of bosonic cavities forming a single-band photonic waveguide. The average frequency of the emitted photon is different from the frequency for single-photon resonant scattering, which perfectly matches the bare frequency of the excited state of the impurity. We study how the energy of the excited state of the impurity influences the spatial profile of the emitted photon. The farther the energy is from the middle of the photonic band, the farther the wave packet is from the causal limit. In particular, if the energy lies in …
We investigate signatures of the excited-state quantum phase transition in the periodic dynamics of the Lipkin-Meshkov-Glick model and the Tavis-Cummings model. In the thermodynamic limit, expectation values of observables in eigenstates of the system can be calculated using classical trajectories. Motivated by this, we suggest a method based on the time evolution of the finite-size system, to find singularities in observables, which arise due to the excited-state quantum phase transition.
We present a state-of-the-art reanalysis of experimental results on Efimov resonances in the three-fermion system of $^6$Li. We discuss different definitions of the 3-body parameter (3BP) for Efimov states, and adopt a definition that excludes effects due to deviations from universal scaling for low-lying states. We develop a finite-temperature model for the case of three distinguishable fermions and apply it to the excited-state Efimov resonance to obtain the most accurate determination to date of the 3BP in an atomic three-body system. Our analysis of ground-state Efimov resonances in the sa…
We study the estimation of parameters in a quantum metrology scheme based on entangled many-body Unruh-DeWitt detectors. It is found that the precision for the estimation of Unruh effect can be enhanced via initial state preparations and parameter selections. It is shown that the precision in the estimation of the Unruh temperature in terms of a many-body-probe metrology is always better than the precision in two probe strategies. The proper acceleration for Bob's detector and the interaction between the accelerated detector and the external field have significant influences on the precision f…
Nonequilibrium dynamics in isolated quantum many-body systems displays a number of intriguing features, such as many-body localization (MBL) and prethermalization. Here we investigate a simple ladder system with disorder, in which various distinct dynamical features coexist and interplay. By exact diagonalization, we demonstrate that the system exhibits the signatures of an MBL-ergodic-MBL reentrant transition, metastability, and disorder-free MBL. We give an account of these properties by introducing a quasi-particle picture and interpreting the quasi-vacuum energy fluctuation as an effective…
Understanding phase transitions in quantum matters constitutes a significant part of present day condensed matter physics. Quantum phase transitions concern ground state properties of many-body systems, and hence their signatures are expected to be pronounced in low-energy states. Here we report signature of a quantum critical point manifested in strongly out-of-equilibrium states with finite energy density with respect to the ground state and extensive (subsystem) entanglement entropy, generated by an external pulse. These non-equilibrium states are evidently completely disordered (e.g., para…
We obtain multiple exact results on the entanglement of the exact excited states of non-integrable models we introduced in arXiv:1708.05021. We first discuss a general formalism to analytically compute the entanglement spectra of exact excited states using Matrix Product States and Matrix Product Operators and illustrate the method by reproducing a general result on single-mode excitations. We then apply this technique to analytically obtain the entanglement spectra of the infinite tower of states of the spin-$S$ AKLT models in the zero and finite energy density limits. We show that in the zer…
Using Fourier transform on a time series generated by unitary evolution, we extract many-body eigenstates of the Bose-Hubbard model corresponding to low energy excitations, which are generated when the insulator-superfluid phase transition is realized in a typical experiment. The analysis is conducted in a symmetric external potential both without and with and disorder. A simple classification of excitations in the absence disorder is provided. The evolution is performed assuming the presence of the parity symmetry in the system rendering many-body quantum states either symmetric or antisymmet…
We investigate the role of dissipation in excited state quantum phase transitions (ESQPT) within the Lipkin-Meshkov-Glick model. Signatures of the ESQPT are directly visible in the complex spectrum of an effective Hamiltonian, whereas they get smeared out in the time-dependence of system observables. In the latter case, we show how delayed feedback control can be used to restore the visibility of the ESQPT signals.
By analyzing the probability distributions of the Loschmidt echo (LE) and quantum work, we examine the nonequilibrium effects of a quantum many-body system, which exhibits an excited-state quantum phase transition (ESQPT). We find that depending on the value of the controlling parameter the distribution of the LE displays different patterns. At the critical point of the ESQPT, both the averaged LE and the averaged work show a cusplike shape. Furthermore, by employing the finite-size scaling analysis of the averaged work, we obtain the critical exponent of the ESQPT. Finally, we show that at th…
We are able to detect clear signatures of dephasing -- a distinct trait of Many-Body Localisation (MBL) -- via the dynamics of two-sites entanglement, quantified through the concurrence. Using the protocol implemented in [Science {\bf 349}, 842 (2015)] we show that -- in the MBL phase -- the average two-site entanglement decays in time as a power law, while in the Anderson localised phase it tends to a plateau. The exponent of the power law is not universal and shows a clear dependence on the strength of the interaction. This behaviour is also qualitatively different in the ergodic phase where…
We study the ground state one-body correlation function in the Lieb-Liniger model. In the spectral representation, correlations are built from contributions stemming from different excited states of the model. We aim to understand which excited states carry significant contributions, specifically focusing on the small energy-momentum part of the dynamic one-body function. We conjecture that relevant excitations take form similar to two-spinon states known from XXZ spin chain. We validate this hypothesis by numerical evaluation of the correlator with ABACUS algorithm and by analytical computati…
A discrete time crystal (DTC) is a robust phase of driven systems that breaks the discrete time translation symmetry of the driving Hamiltonian. Recent experiments have observed DTC signatures in two distinct systems. Here we show nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) observations of DTC signatures in a third, strikingly different system: an ordered spatial crystal. We use a novel DTC echo experiment to probe the coherence of the driven system. Finally, we show that interactions during the pulse of the DTC sequence contribute to the decay of the signal, complicating attempts to measure the intrinsi…
We predict a generic manifestation of quantum interference in many-body bosonic systems resulting in a coherent enhancement of the average return probability in Fock space. This enhancement is both robust with respect to variations of external parameters and genuinely quantum insofar as it cannot be described within mean-field approaches. As a direct manifestation of the superposition principle in Fock space, it arises when many-body equilibration due to interactions sets in. Using a semiclassical approach based on interfering paths in Fock space, we calculate the magnitude of the backscatteri…
Highly excited states of quantum many-body systems are central objects in the study of quantum dynamics and thermalization that challenge classical computational methods due to their volume-law entanglement content. In this work, we explore the potential of variational quantum algorithms to approximate such states. We propose an adaptive variational algorithm, adaptive VQE-X, that self-generates a variational ansatz for arbitrary eigenstates of a many-body Hamiltonian $H$ by attempting to minimize the energy variance with respect to $H$. We benchmark the method by applying it to an Ising spin …
