Quasiparticle engineering and entanglement propagation in a quantum many-body system

By P. Jurcevic, B. Lanyon, Philipp Hauke, Cornelius Hempel, Peter Zoller, Rainer Blatt, C. F. Roos. Nature, 2014

766 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The key to explaining and controlling a range of quantum phenomena is to study how information propagates around many-body systems. Quantum dynamics can be described by particle-like carriers of information that emerge in the collective behaviour of the underlying system, the so-called quasiparticles. These elementary excitations are predicted to distribute quantum information in a fashion determined by the system’s interactions. Here we report quasiparticle dynamics observed in a quantum many-body system of trapped atomic ions. First, we observe the entanglement distributed by quasiparticles as they trace out light-cone-like wavefronts. Second, using the ability to tune the interaction range in our system, we observe information propagation in an experimental regime where the effective-light-cone picture does not apply. Our results will enable experimental studies of a range of quantum phenomena, including transport, thermalization, localization and entanglement growth, and represent a first step towards a new quantum-optic regime of engineered quasiparticles with tunable nonlinear interactions.

Subfields: Artificial Intelligence, Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/5824271e48d629f6ef094a63247313747b0c8ca4

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Citations in the corpus

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