arXiv subjects

Anatoli Polkovnikov

Publications and source records attributed to Anatoli Polkovnikov.

At least 55 records · Page 3Linked to original sources

arXiv2020

Emergent conservation laws and nonthermal states in the mixed-field Ising model

This paper presents a method of computing approximate conservation laws and eigenstates of integrability-broken models using the concept of adiabatic continuation. Given some Hamiltonian, eigenstates and conserved operators may be computed by using those of a simple Hamiltonian close by in parameter space, dressed by some unitary rotation. However, most adiabatic continuation analyses only use this unitary implicitly. In this work, approximate adiabatic gauge potentials are used to construct a state dressing using variational methods, to compute eigenstates via a rotated truncated spectrum approximation. These methods allow construction of both low and high-energy approximate nonthermal eigenstates, as well as quasi-local almost-conserved operators, in models where integrability may be non-perturbatively broken. These concepts will be demonstrated in the mixed-field Ising model.

cond-mat.str-el↗

arXiv2019

Variational Schrieffer-Wolff Transformations for Quantum Many-Body Dynamics

Building on recent results for adiabatic gauge potentials, we propose a variational approach for computing the generator of Schrieffer-Wolff transformations. These transformations consist of block diagonalizing a Hamiltonian through a unitary rotation, which leads to effective dynamics in a computationally tractable reduced Hilbert space. The generator of these rotations are computed variationally and thus go beyond standard perturbative methods; the error is controlled by the locality of the variational ansatz. The method is demonstrated on two models. First, in the attractive Fermi-Hubbard model with on-site disorder, we find indications of a lack of observable many-body localization in the thermodynamic limit due to the inevitable mixture of different spinon sectors. Second, in the low-energy sector of the XY spin model with a broken U(1)-symmetry, we analyze ground state response functions by combining the variational SW transformation with the truncated spectrum approach.

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arXiv2019

Semiclassical echo dynamics in the Sachdev-Ye-Kitaev model

The existence of a quantum butterfly effect in the form of exponential sensitivity to small perturbations has been under debate for a long time. Lately, this question gained increased interest due to the proposal to probe chaotic dynamics and scrambling using out-of-time-order correlators. In this work we study echo dynamics in the Sachdev-Ye-Kitaev model under effective time reversal in a semiclassical approach. We demonstrate that small imperfections introduced in the time-reversal procedure result in an exponential divergence from the perfect echo, which allows to identify a Lyapunov exponent $λ_L$. In particular, we find that $λ_L$ is twice the Lyapunov exponent of the semiclassical equations of motion. This behavior is attributed to the growth of an out-of-time-order double commutator that resembles an out-of-time-order correlator.

cond-mat.stat-mech↗

arXiv2019

Floquet-engineering counterdiabatic protocols in quantum many-body systems

Counterdiabatic (CD) driving presents a way of generating adiabatic dynamics at arbitrary pace, where excitations due to non-adiabaticity are exactly compensated by adding an auxiliary driving term to the Hamiltonian. While this CD term is theoretically known and given by the adiabatic gauge potential, obtaining and implementing this potential in many-body systems is a formidable task, requiring knowledge of the spectral properties of the instantaneous Hamiltonians and control of highly nonlocal multibody interactions. We show how an approximate gauge potential can be systematically built up as a series of nested commutators, remaining well-defined in the thermodynamic limit. Furthermore, the resulting CD driving protocols can be realized up to arbitrary order without leaving the available control space using tools from periodically-driven (Floquet) systems. This is illustrated on few- and many-body quantum systems, where the resulting Floquet protocols significantly suppress dissipation and provide a drastic increase in fidelity.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2019

Geometric Speed Limit of Accessible Many-Body State Preparation

We analyze state preparation within a restricted space of local control parameters between adiabatically connected states of control Hamiltonians. We formulate a conjecture that the time integral of energy fluctuations over the protocol duration is bounded from below by the geodesic length set by the quantum geometric tensor. The conjecture implies a geometric lower bound for the quantum speed limit (QSL). We prove the conjecture for arbitrary, sufficiently slow protocols using adiabatic perturbation theory and show that the bound is saturated by geodesic protocols, which keep the energy variance constant along the trajectory. Our conjecture implies that any optimal unit-fidelity protocol, even those that drive the system far from equilibrium, are fundamentally constrained by the quantum geometry of adiabatic evolution. When the control space includes all possible couplings, spanning the full Hilbert space, we recover the well-known Mandelstam-Tamm bound. However, using only accessible local controls to anneal in complex models such as glasses or to target individual excited states in quantum chaotic systems, the geometric bound for the quantum speed limit can be exponentially large in the system size due to a diverging geodesic length. We validate our conjecture both analytically by constructing counter-diabatic and fast-forward protocols for a three-level system, and numerically in nonintegrable spin chains and a nonlocal SYK model.

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arXiv2019

Swift heat transfer by fast-forward driving in open quantum systems

Typically, time-dependent thermodynamic protocols need to run asymptotically slowly in order to avoid dissipative losses. By adapting ideas from counter-diabatic driving and Floquet engineering to open systems, we develop fast-forward protocols for swiftly thermalizing a system oscillator locally coupled to an optical phonon bath. These protocols control the system frequency and the system-bath coupling to induce a resonant state exchange between the system and the bath. We apply the fast-forward protocols to realize a fast approximate Otto engine operating at high power near the Carnot Efficiency. Our results suggest design principles for swift cooling protocols in coupled many-body systems.

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arXiv2019

Asymptotic Prethermalization in Periodically Driven Classical Spin Chains

We reveal a continuous dynamical heating transition between a prethermal and an infinite-temperature stage in a clean, chaotic periodically driven classical spin chain. The transition time is a steep exponential function of the drive frequency, showing that the exponentially long-lived prethermal plateau, originally observed in quantum Floquet systems, survives the classical limit. Even though there is no straightforward generalization of Floquet's theorem to nonlinear systems, we present strong evidence that the prethermal physics is well described by the inverse-frequency expansion. We relate the stability and robustness of the prethermal plateau to drive-induced synchronization not captured by the expansion. Our results set the pathway to transfer the ideas of Floquet engineering to classical many-body systems, and are directly relevant for photonic crystals and cold atom experiments in the superfluid regime.

cond-mat.stat-mech↗

arXiv2018

Floquet-engineered quantum state manipulation in a noisy qubit

Adiabatic evolution is a common strategy for manipulating quantum states and has been employed in diverse fields such as quantum simulation, computation and annealing. However, adiabatic evolution is inherently slow and therefore susceptible to decoherence. Existing methods for speeding up adiabatic evolution require complex many-body operators or are difficult to construct for multi-level systems. Using the tools of Floquet engineering, we design a scheme for high-fidelity quantum state manipulation, utilizing only the interactions available in the original Hamiltonian. We apply this approach to a qubit and experimentally demonstrate its performance with the electronic spin of a Nitrogen-vacancy center in diamond. Our Floquet-engineered protocol achieves state preparation fidelity of $0.994 \pm 0.004$, on the same level as the conventional fast-forward protocol, but is more robust to external noise acting on the qubit. Floquet engineering provides a powerful platform for high-fidelity quantum state manipulation in complex and noisy quantum systems.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2018

Reinforcement Learning in Different Phases of Quantum Control

The ability to prepare a physical system in a desired quantum state is central to many areas of physics such as nuclear magnetic resonance, cold atoms, and quantum computing. Yet, preparing states quickly and with high fidelity remains a formidable challenge. In this work we implement cutting-edge Reinforcement Learning (RL) techniques and show that their performance is comparable to optimal control methods in the task of finding short, high-fidelity driving protocol from an initial to a target state in non-integrable many-body quantum systems of interacting qubits. RL methods learn about the underlying physical system solely through a single scalar reward (the fidelity of the resulting state) calculated from numerical simulations of the physical system. We further show that quantum state manipulation, viewed as an optimization problem, exhibits a spin-glass-like phase transition in the space of protocols as a function of the protocol duration. Our RL-aided approach helps identify variational protocols with nearly optimal fidelity, even in the glassy phase, where optimal state manipulation is exponentially hard. This study highlights the potential usefulness of RL for applications in out-of-equilibrium quantum physics.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2018

Quantum Hydrodynamics in Spin Chains with Phase Space Methods

Connecting short time microscopic dynamics with long time hydrodynamics in strongly correlated quantum systems is one of the outstanding questions. In particular, it is very difficult to determine various hydrodynamic coefficients like the diffusion constant or viscosity starting from a microscopic model: exact quantum simulations are limited to either small system sizes or to short times, which are insufficient to reach asymptotic behavior. In this Letter, we show that these difficulties, at least for a particular model, can be circumvented by using the cluster truncated Wigner approximation (CTWA), which maps quantum Hamiltonian dynamics into classical Hamiltonian dynamics in auxiliary high-dimensional phase space. We apply CTWA to a XXZ next-nearest-neighbor spin 1/2 chain and find behavior consisting of short time spin relaxation which gradually crosses over to emergent diffusive behavior at long times. For a random initial state we show that CTWA correctly reproduces the whole spin spectral function. Necessary in this construction is sampling from properly fluctuating initial conditions: the Dirac mean-field (variational) ansatz, which neglects such fluctuations, leads to incorrect predictions.

cond-mat.stat-mech↗

arXiv2018

Broken symmetry in a two-qubit quantum control landscape

We analyze the physics of optimal protocols to prepare a target state with high fidelity in a symmetrically coupled two-qubit system. By varying the protocol duration, we find a discontinuous phase transition, which is characterized by a spontaneous breaking of a $\mathbb{Z}_2$ symmetry in the functional form of the optimal protocol, and occurs below the quantum speed limit. We study in detail this phase and demonstrate that even though high-fidelity protocols come degenerate with respect to their fidelity, they lead to final states of different entanglement entropy shared between the qubits. Consequently, while globally both optimal protocols are equally far away from the target state, one is locally closer than the other. An approximate variational mean-field theory which captures the physics of the different phases is developed.

cond-mat.stat-mech↗

arXiv2018

Cluster Truncated Wigner Approximation in Strongly Interacting Systems

We present a general method by which linear quantum Hamiltonian dynamics with exponentially many degrees of freedom is replaced by approximate classical nonlinear dynamics with the number of degrees of freedom (phase space dimensionality) scaling polynomially in the system size. This method is based on generalization of the truncated Wigner approximation (TWA) to a higher dimensional phase space, where phase space variables are associated with a complete set of quantum operators spanning finite size clusters. The method becomes asymptotically exact with the increasing cluster size. The crucial feature of TWA is fluctuating initial conditions, which we approximate by a Gaussian distribution. We show that such fluctuations dramatically increase accuracy of TWA over traditional cluster mean field approximations. In this way we can treat on equal footing quantum and thermal fluctuations as well as compute entanglement and various equal and non-equal time correlation functions. The main limitation of the method is exponential scaling of the phase space dimensionality with the cluster size, which can be significantly reduced by using the language of Schwinger bosons and can likely be further reduced by truncating the local Hilbert space variables. We demonstrate the power of this method analyzing dynamics in various spin chains with and without disorder and show that we can capture such phenomena as long time hydrodynamic relaxation, many-body localization and the ballistic spread of entanglement.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2017

Geometry and non-adiabatic response in quantum and classical systems

In these lecture notes, partly based on a course taught at the Karpacz Winter School in March 2014, we explore the close connections between non-adiabatic response of a system with respect to macroscopic parameters and the geometry of quantum and classical states. We center our discussion around adiabatic gauge potentials, which are the generators of unitary basis transformations in quantum systems and generators of special canonical transformations in classical systems. In quantum systems, eigenstate expectation values of these potentials are the Berry connections and the covariance matrix of these gauge potentials is the geometric tensor, whose antisymmetric part defines the Berry curvature and whose symmetric part is the Fubini-Study metric tensor. In classical systems one simply replaces the eigenstate expectation value by an average over the micro-canonical shell. For complicated interacting systems, we show that a variational principle may be used to derive approximate gauge potentials. We then express the non-adiabatic response of the physical observables of the system through these gauge potentials, specifically demonstrating the close connection of the geometric tensor to the notions of Lorentz force and renormalized mass. We highlight applications of this formalism to deriving counter-diabatic (dissipationless) driving protocols in various systems, as well as to finding equations of motion for slow macroscopic parameters coupled to fast microscopic degrees of freedom that go beyond macroscopic Hamiltonian dynamics. Finally, we illustrate these ideas with a number of simple examples and highlight a few more complicated ones drawn from recent literature.

cond-mat.quant-gas↗

arXiv2017

Replica resummation of the Baker-Campbell-Hausdorff series

We developed a novel perturbative expansion based on the replica trick for the Floquet Hamiltonian governing the dynamics of periodically kicked systems where the kick strength is the small parameter. The expansion is formally equivalent to an infinite resummation of the Baker-Campbell-Hausdorff series in the un-driven (non-perturbed) Hamiltonian, while considering terms up to a finite order in the kick strength. As an application of the replica expansion, we analyze an Ising spin 1/2 chain periodically kicked with magnetic field of strength $h$, which has both longitudinal and transverse components. We demonstrate that even away from the regime of high frequency driving, the heating rate is nonperturbative in the kick strength bounded from above by a stretched exponential: $e^{-{\rm const}\,h^{-1/2}}$. This guarantees existence of a very long pre-thermal regime, where the dynamics is governed by the Floquet Hamiltonian obtained from the replica expansion.

cond-mat.str-el↗

arXiv2017

Adiabatic Perturbation Theory and Geometry of Periodically-Driven Systems

We give a systematic review of the adiabatic theorem and the leading non-adiabatic corrections in periodically-driven (Floquet) systems. These corrections have a two-fold origin: (i) conventional ones originating from the gradually changing Floquet Hamiltonian and (ii) corrections originating from changing the micro-motion operator. These corrections conspire to give a Hall-type linear response for non-stroboscopic (time-averaged) observables allowing one to measure the Berry curvature and the Chern number related to the Floquet Hamiltonian, thus extending these concepts to periodically-driven many-body systems. The non-zero Floquet Chern number allows one to realize a Thouless energy pump, where one can adiabatically add energy to the system in discrete units of the driving frequency. We discuss the validity of Floquet Adiabatic Perturbation Theory (FAPT) using five different models covering linear and non-linear few and many-particle systems. We argue that in interacting systems, even in the stable high-frequency regimes, FAPT breaks down at ultra slow ramp rates due to avoided crossings of photon resonances, not captured by the inverse-frequency expansion, leading to a counter-intuitive stronger heating at slower ramp rates. Nevertheless, large windows in the ramp rate are shown to exist for which the physics of interacting driven systems is well captured by FAPT.

cond-mat.quant-gas↗

arXiv2017

Chaos and thermalization in small quantum systems

Chaos and ergodicity are the cornerstones of statistical physics and thermodynamics. While classically even small systems like a particle in a two-dimensional cavity, can exhibit chaotic behavior and thereby relax to a microcanonical ensemble, quantum systems formally can not. Recent theoretical breakthroughs and, in particular, the eigenstate thermalization hypothesis (ETH) however indicate that quantum systems can also thermalize. In fact ETH provided us with a framework connecting microscopic models and macroscopic phenomena, based on the notion of highly entangled quantum states. Such thermalization was beautifully demonstrated experimentally by A. Kaufman et. al. who studied relaxation dynamics of a small lattice system of interacting bosonic particles. By directly measuring the entanglement entropy of subsystems, as well as other observables, they showed that after the initial transient time the system locally relaxes to a thermal ensemble while globally maintaining a zero-entropy pure state.

cond-mat.quant-gas↗

arXiv2017

Integrable Floquet dynamics

We discuss several classes of integrable Floquet systems, i.e. systems which do not exhibit chaotic behavior even under a time dependent perturbation. The first class is associated with finite-dimensional Lie groups and infinite-dimensional generalization thereof. The second class is related to the row transfer matrices of the 2D statistical mechanics models. The third class of models, called here "boost models", is constructed as a periodic interchange of two Hamiltonians - one is the integrable lattice model Hamiltonian, while the second is the boost operator. The latter for known cases coincides with the entanglement Hamiltonian and is closely related to the corner transfer matrix of the corresponding 2D statistical models. We present several explicit examples. As an interesting application of the boost models we discuss a possibility of generating periodically oscillating states with the period different from that of the driving field. In particular, one can realize an oscillating state by performing a static quench to a boost operator. We term this state a "Quantum Boost Clock". All analyzed setups can be readily realized experimentally, for example in cod atoms.

cond-mat.stat-mech↗

arXiv2017

Semiclassical approach to Dynamics of Interacting Fermions

Understanding the behavior of interacting fermions is of fundamental interest in many fields ranging from condensed matter to high energy physics. Developing numerically efficient and accurate simulation methods is an indispensable part of this. Already in equilibrium, fermions are notoriously hard to handle due to the sign problem. Out of equilibrium, an important outstanding problem is the efficient numerical simulation of the dynamics of these systems. In this work we develop a new semiclassical phase-space approach (a.k.a. the truncated Wigner approximation) for simulating the dynamics of interacting fermions in arbitrary dimensions. As fermions are essentially non-classical objects, a phase-space is constructed out of all fermionic bilinears. Classical phase-space is thus comprised of highly non-local (hidden) variables representing these bilinears, and the cost of the method is that it scales quadratic rather than linear with system size. We demonstrate the strength of the method by comparing the results to the exact quantum dynamics of fermion expansion in the Hubbard model and quantum thermalization in the Sachdev-Ye-Kitaev (SYK) model for small systems, where the semiclassics nearly perfectly reproduces correct results. We furthermore analyze fermion expansion in a larger, intractable by exact methods, 2D Hubbard model, which is directly relevant to recent cold atom experiments.

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