Quantum simulation of antiferromagnetic spin chains in an optical lattice
By Jonathan Simon, W. Bakr, R. Ma, M. Tai, P. Preiss, M. Greiner. Nature, 2011
722 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Understanding exotic forms of magnetism in quantum mechanical systems is a central goal of modern condensed matter physics, with implications for systems ranging from high-temperature superconductors to spintronic devices. Simulating magnetic materials in the vicinity of a quantum phase transition is computationally intractable on classical computers, owing to the extreme complexity arising from quantum entanglement between the constituent magnetic spins. Here we use a degenerate Bose gas of rubidium atoms confined in an optical lattice to simulate a chain of interacting quantum Ising spins as they undergo a phase transition. Strong spin interactions are achieved through a site-occupation to pseudo-spin mapping. As we vary a magnetic field, quantum fluctuations drive a phase transition from a paramagnetic phase into an antiferromagnetic phase. In the paramagnetic phase, the interaction between the spins is overwhelmed by the applied field, which aligns the spins. In the antiferromagnetic phase, the interaction dominates and produces staggered magnetic ordering. Magnetic domain formation is observed through both in situ site-resolved imaging and noise correlation measurements. By demonstrating a route to quantum magnetism in an optical lattice, this work should facilitate further investigations of magnetic models using ultracold atoms, thereby improving our understanding of real magnetic materials.
Subfields: Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics, Condensed Matter Physics
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/301aee02c607f602af2648a1f3164276f456869f
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In Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics
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Citations in the corpus
- Engineering Ising-XY spin-models in a triangular lattice using tunable artificial gauge fields (2013, background): “As the system is only weakly confined in the z-direction with respect to the lattice potential—the overall external harmonic confinement is ωTot= 2π× (31,53,40)Hz—the atoms form an array of approximately 2,100–2,600 elongated tubes with a mean occupancy in the range of 70–95 atoms (175–235 in the ce”
- Nonequilibrium dynamical mean-field theory and its applications (2013, background): “…cold gases in optical lattices, it has been demonstrated that non-perturbatively strong external fields of oscillating (Strucket al., 2011) or DC nature (Simon et al., 2011) can be used not only to change the state of the system, but to modify its microscopic Hamiltonian in a controlled fashion.”
- Reinforcement Learning in Different Phases of Quantum Control (2017, background): “To this end, consider a closed chain of L-coupled qubits, which can be experimentally realized with superconducting qubits [8], cold atoms [77], and trapped ions [6]:”