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Noncommuting conserved quantities have recently launched a subfield of quantum thermodynamics. In conventional thermodynamics, a system of interest and an environment exchange quantities—energy, particles, electric charge, etc.—that are globally conserved and are represented by Hermitian operators. These operators were implicitly assumed to commute with each other, until a few years ago. Freeing the operators to fail to commute has enabled many theoretical discoveries—about reference frames, entropy production, resource-theory models, etc. Little work has bridged these results from abstract theory to experimental reality. This paper provides a methodology for building this bridge systematically: we present a prescription for constructing Hamiltonians that conserve noncommuting quantities globally while transporting the quantities locally. The Hamiltonians can couple arbitrarily many subsystems together and can be integrable or nonintegrable. Our Hamiltonians may be realized physically with superconducting qudits, with ultracold atoms, and with trapped ions.

 

The ability to generate and control strong long-range interactions via highly excited electronic states has been the foundation for recent breakthroughs in a host of areas, from atomic and molecular physics to quantum optics and technology. Rydberg excitons provide a promising solid-state realization of such highly excited states, for which record-breaking orbital sizes of up to a micrometer have indeed been observed in cuprous oxide semiconductors. Here, we demonstrate the generation and control of strong exciton interactions in this material by optically producing two distinct quantum states of Rydberg excitons. This is made possible by two-color pump-probe experiments that allow for a detailed probing of the interactions. Our experiments reveal the emergence of strong spatial correlations and an inter-state Rydberg blockade that extends over remarkably large distances of several micrometers. The generated many-body states of semiconductor excitons exhibit universal properties that only depend on the shape of the interaction potential and yield clear evidence for its vastly extended-range and power-law character.

 

Quantum many-body scarring is a paradigm of weak ergodicity breaking arising due to the presence of special nonthermal many-body eigenstates that possess low entanglement entropy, are equally spaced in energy, and concentrate in certain parts of the Hilbert space. Though scars have been shown to be intimately connected to gauge theories, their stability in such experimentally relevant models is still an open question, and it is generally considered that they exist only under fine-tuned conditions. In this work, we show through Krylov-based time-evolution methods how quantum many-body scars can be made robust in the presence of experimental errors through utilizing terms linear in the gauge-symmetry generator or a simplified pseudogenerator in U ( 1 ) and Z 2 lattice gauge theories. Our findings are explained by the concept of quantum Zeno dynamics. Our experimentally feasible methods can be readily implemented in existing large-scale ultracold-atom quantum simulators and setups of Rydberg atoms with optical tweezers. 

The excitonic insulator is an electronically driven phase of matter that emerges upon the spontaneous formation and Bose condensation of excitons. Detecting this exotic order in candidate materials is a subject of paramount importance, as the size of the excitonic gap in the band structure establishes the potential of this collective state for superfluid energy transport. However, the identification of this phase in real solids is hindered by the coexistence of a structural order parameter with the same symmetry as the excitonic order. Only a few materials are currently believed to host a dominant excitonic phase, Ta 2 NiSe 5 being the most promising. Here, we test this scenario by using an ultrashort laser pulse to quench the broken-symmetry phase of this transition metal chalcogenide. Tracking the dynamics of the material’s electronic and crystal structure after light excitation reveals spectroscopic fingerprints that are compatible only with a primary order parameter of phononic nature. We rationalize our findings through state-of-the-art calculations, confirming that the structural order accounts for most of the gap opening. Our results suggest that the spontaneous symmetry breaking in Ta 2 NiSe 5 is mostly of structural character, hampering the possibility to realize quasi-dissipationless energy transport. 

ABSTRACT Using a quantum-mechanical close-coupling method, we calculate cross-sections for fine-structure excitation and relaxation of Si and S atoms in collisions with atomic hydrogen. Rate coefficients are calculated over a range of temperatures for astrophysical applications. We determine the temperature-dependent critical densities for the relaxation of Si and S in collisions with H and compare these to the critical densities for collisions with electrons. The present calculations should be useful in modelling environments exhibiting the [S i] 25 μm and [S i] 57 μm far-infrared emission lines or where cooling of S and Si by collisions with H is of interest.