arXiv subjects

Adolfo del Campo

Publications and source records attributed to Adolfo del Campo.

At least 109 records · Page 6Linked to original sources

arXiv2020

Decoherence in Conformal Field Theory

Noise sources are ubiquitous in Nature and give rise to a description of quantum systems in terms of stochastic Hamiltonians. Decoherence dominates the noise-averaged dynamics and leads to dephasing and the decay of coherences in the eigenbasis of the fluctuating operator. For energy-diffusion processes stemming from fluctuations of the system Hamiltonian the characteristic decoherence time is shown to be proportional to the heat capacity. We analyze the decoherence dynamics of entangled CFTs and characterize the dynamics of the purity, and logarithmic negativity, that are shown to decay monotonically as a function of time. The converse is true for the quantum Renyi entropies. From the short-time asymptotics of the purity, the decoherence rate is identified and shown to be proportional to the central charge. The fixed point characterizing long times of evolution depends on the presence degeneracies in the energy spectrum. We show how information loss associated with decoherence can be attributed to its leakage to an auxiliary environment and discuss how gravity duals of decoherence dynamics in holographic CFTs looks like in AdS/CFT. We find that the inner horizon region of eternal AdS black hole is highly squeezed due to decoherence.

hep-th↗

arXiv2020

Time-information uncertainty relations in thermodynamics

Physical systems that power motion and create structure in a fixed amount of time dissipate energy and produce entropy. Whether living or synthetic, systems performing these dynamic functions must balance dissipation and speed. Here, we show that rates of energy and entropy exchange are subject to a speed limit -- a time-information uncertainty relation -- imposed by the rates of change in the information content of the system. This uncertainty relation bounds the time that elapses before the change in a thermodynamic quantity has the same magnitude as its initial standard deviation. From this general bound, we establish a family of speed limits for heat, work, entropy production, and entropy flow depending on the experimental constraints on the system. In all of these inequalities, the time scale of transient dynamical fluctuations is universally bounded by the Fisher information. Moreover, they all have a mathematical form that mirrors the Mandelstam-Tamm version of the time-energy uncertainty relation in quantum mechanics. These bounds on the speed of arbitrary observables apply to transient systems away from thermodynamic equilibrium, independent of the physical assumptions about the stochastic dynamics or their function.

cond-mat.stat-mech↗

arXiv2019

Experimentally testing quantum critical dynamics beyond the Kibble-Zurek mechanism

We experimentally probe the distribution of kink pairs resulting from driving a one-dimensional quantum Ising chain through the paramagnet-ferromagnet quantum phase transition, using a single trapped ion as a quantum simulator in momentum space. The number of kink pairs after the transition follows a Poisson binomial distribution, in which all cumulants scale with a universal power-law as a function of the quench time in which the transition is crossed. We experimentally verified this scaling for the first cumulants and report deviations due to noise-induced dephasing of the trapped ion. Our results establish that the universal character of the critical dynamics can be extended beyond the paradigmatic Kibble-Zurek mechanism, which accounts for the mean kink number, to characterize the full probability distribution of topological defects.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2019

Spontaneous symmetry breaking induced by quantum monitoring

Spontaneous symmetry breaking (SSB) is responsible for structure formation in scenarios ranging from condensed matter to cosmology. SSB is broadly understood in terms of perturbations to the Hamiltonian governing the dynamics or to the state of the system. We study SSB due to quantum monitoring of a system via continuous quantum measurements. The acquisition of information during the measurement process induces a measurement back-action that seeds SSB. In this setting, by monitoring different observables, an observer can tailor the topology of the vacuum manifold, the pattern of symmetry breaking and the nature of the resulting domains and topological defects.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2019

Shortcuts to adiabaticity by counterdiabatic driving for trapped-ion displacement in phase space

The application of adiabatic protocols in quantum technologies is severely limited by environmental sources of noise and decoherence. Shortcuts to adiabaticity by counterdiabatic driving constitute a powerful alternative that speed up time-evolution while mimicking adiabatic dynamics. Here we present the first experimental implementation of counterdiabatic driving in a continuous variable system, a shortcut to the adiabatic transport of a trapped ion in the phase space. The resulting dynamics is equivalent to a "fast-motion video" of the adiabatic trajectory. The robustness of this protocol is shown to surpass that of competing schemes based on classical local controls and Fourier optimization methods. Our results demonstrate that shortcuts to adiabaticity provide a robust speedup of quantum protocols of wide applicability in quantum technologies.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2019

Probing the Full Distribution of Many-Body Observables by Single-Qubit Interferometry

We present an experimental scheme to measure the full distribution of many-body observables in spin systems, both in and out of equilibrium, using an auxiliary qubit as a probe. We focus on the determination of the magnetization and the kink-number statistics at thermal equilibrium. The corresponding characteristic functions are related to the analytically-continued partition function. Thus, both distributions can be directly extracted from experimental measurements of the coherence of a probe qubit that is coupled to an Ising-type bath, as reported in [X. Peng et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 114, 010601 (2015)] for the detection of Lee-Yang zeroes.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2019

Work Statistics, Loschmidt Echo and Information Scrambling in Chaotic Quantum Systems

Characterizing the work statistics of driven complex quantum systems is generally challenging because of the exponential growth with the system size of the number of transitions involved between different energy levels. We consider the quantum work distribution associated with the driving of chaotic quantum systems described by random matrix Hamiltonians and characterize exactly the work statistics associated with a sudden quench for arbitrary temperature and system size. Knowledge of the work statistics yields the Loschmidt echo dynamics of an entangled state between two copies of the system of interest, the thermofield double state. This echo dynamics is dictated by the spectral form factor. We discuss its relation to frame potentials and its use to assess information scrambling.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2019

Quantum Speed Limits under Continuous Quantum Measurements

The pace of evolution of physical systems is fundamentally constrained by quantum speed limits (QSL), which have found broad applications in quantum science and technology. We consider the speed of evolution for quantum systems undergoing stochastic dynamics due to continuous measurements. It is shown that that there are trajectories for which standard QSL are violated, and we provide estimates for the range of velocities in an ensemble of realizations of continuous measurement records. We determine the dispersion of the speed of evolution and characterize the full statistics of single trajectories. By characterizing the dispersion of the Bures angle, we further show that continuous quantum measurements induce Brownian dynamics in Hilbert space.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2019

Focus on Shortcuts to Adiabaticity

Shortcuts to Adiabaticity (STA) constitute driving schemes that provide an alternative to adiabatic protocols to control and guide the dynamics of classical and quantum systems without the requirement of slow driving. Research on STA advances swiftly with theoretical progress being accompanied by experiments on a wide variety of platforms. We summarize recent developments emphasizing advances reported in this focus issue while providing an outlook with open problems and prospects for future research.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2019

Extreme Decoherence and Quantum Chaos

We study the ultimate limits to the decoherence rate associated with dephasing processes. Fluctuating chaotic quantum systems are shown to exhibit extreme decoherence, with a rate that scales exponentially with the particle number, thus exceeding the polynomial dependence of systems with fluctuating $k$-body interactions. Our findings suggest the use of quantum chaotic systems as a natural test-bed for spontaneous wave function collapse models. We further discuss the implications on the decoherence of AdS/CFT black holes resulting from the unitarity loss associated with energy dephasing.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2018

An Interaction-Driven Many-Particle Quantum Heat Engine: Universal Behavior

A quantum heat engine (QHE) based on the interaction driving of a many-particle working medium is introduced. The cycle alternates isochoric heating and cooling strokes with both interaction-driven processes that are simultaneously isochoric and isentropic. When the working substance is confined in a tight waveguide, the efficiency of the cycle becomes universal at low temperatures and governed by the ratio of velocities of a Luttinger liquid. We demonstrate the performance of the engine with an interacting Bose gas as a working medium and show that the average work per particle is maximum at criticality. We further discuss a work outcoupling mechanism based on the dependence of the interaction strength on the external spin degrees of freedom.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2018

Universal Statistics of Topological Defects Formed in a Quantum Phase Transition

When a quantum phase transition is crossed in finite time, critical slowing down leads to the breakdown of adiabatic dynamics and the formation of topological defects. The average density of defects scales with the quench rate following a universal power-law predicted by the Kibble-Zurek mechanism. We analyze the full counting statistics of kinks and report the exact kink number distribution in the transverse-field quantum Ising model. Kink statistics is described by the Poisson binomial distribution with all cumulants exhibiting a universal power-law scaling with the quench rate. In the absence of finite-size effects, the distribution approaches a normal one, a feature that is expected to apply broadly in systems described by the Kibble-Zurek mechanism.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2018

Quantum work statistics, Loschmidt echo and information scrambling

A universal relation is established between the quantum work probability distribution of an isolated driven quantum system and the Loschmidt echo dynamics of a two-mode squeezed state. When the initial density matrix is canonical, the Loschmidt echo of the purified double thermofield state provides a direct measure of information scrambling and can be related to the analytic continuation of the partition function. Information scrambling is then described by the quantum work statistics associated with the time-reversal operation on a single copy, associated with the sudden negation of the system Hamiltonian.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2018

Nonequilibrium uncertainty principle from information geometry

With a statistical measure of distance, we derive a classical uncertainty relation for processes traversing nonequilibrium states both transiently and irreversibly. The geometric uncertainty associated with dynamical histories that we define is an upper bound for the entropy production and flow rates, but it does not necessarily correlate with the shortest distance to equilibrium. For a model one-bit memory device, we find that expediting the erasure protocol increases the maximum dissipated heat and geometric uncertainty. A driven version of Onsager's three-state model shows that a set of dissipative, high-uncertainty initial conditions, some of which are near equilibrium, scar the state space.

cond-mat.stat-mech↗

arXiv2018

Shortcuts to adiabaticity in Fermi gases

Shortcuts to adiabaticity (STA) provide an alternative to adiabatic protocols to guide the dynamics of the system of interest without the requirement of slow driving. We report the controlled speedup via STA of the nonadiabatic dynamics of a Fermi gas, both in the non-interacting and strongly coupled, unitary regimes. Friction-free superadiabatic expansion strokes, with no residual excitations in the final state, are demonstrated in the unitary regime by engineering the modulation of the frequencies and aspect ratio of the harmonic trap. STA are also analyzed and implemented in the high-temperature regime, where the shear viscosity plays a pivotal role and the Fermi gas is described by viscous hydrodynamics.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2018

Friction-free quantum machines

The operation of a quantum heat engine in finite time generally faces a trade-off between efficiency and power. Using shortcuts to adiabaticity (STA), this trade off can be avoided to engineer thermal machines that operate at maximum efficiency and tunable output power. We demonstrate the use of STA to engineer a scalable superadiabatic quantum Otto cycle and report recent experimental progress to tailor quantum friction in finite-time quantum thermodynamics. In the presence of quantum friction, it is also shown that the use of a many-particle working medium can boost the performance of the quantum machines with respect to an ensemble of single-particle thermal machines.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2017

Superadiabatic quantum friction suppression in finite-time thermodynamics

Optimal performance of thermal machines is reached by suppressing friction. Friction in quantum thermodynamics results from fast driving schemes that generate nonadiabatic excitations. The far-from-equilibrium dynamics of quantum devices can be tailored by shortcuts to adiabaticity to suppress quantum friction. We experimentally demonstrate friction-free superadiabatic strokes with a trapped unitary Fermi gas as a working substance and establish the equivalence between the superadiabatic mean work and its adiabatic value.

cond-mat.quant-gas↗

arXiv2017

Decay of a Thermofield-Double State in Chaotic Quantum Systems

Scrambling in interacting quantum systems out of equilibrium is particularly effective in the chaotic regime. Under time evolution, initially localized information is said to be scrambled as it spreads throughout the entire system. This spreading can be analyzed with the spectral form factor, which is defined in terms of the analytic continuation of the partition function. The latter is equivalent to the survival probability of a thermofield double state under unitary dynamics. Using random matrices from the Gaussian unitary ensemble (GUE) as Hamiltonians for the time evolution, we obtain exact analytical expressions at finite $N$ for the survival probability. Numerical simulations of the survival probability with matrices taken from the Gaussian orthogonal ensemble (GOE) are also provided. The GOE is more suitable for our comparison with numerical results obtained with a disordered spin chain with local interactions. Common features between the random matrix and the realistic disordered model in the chaotic regime are identified. The differences that emerge as the spin model approaches a many-body localized phase are also discussed.

cond-mat.str-el↗