arXiv subjects

Hong Yao

Publications and source records attributed to Hong Yao.

At least 55 records · Page 3Linked to original sources

arXiv2024

Correlated topological flat bands in rhombohedral graphite

Flat bands and nontrivial topological physics are two important topics of condensed matter physics. With a unique stacking configuration analogous to the Su-Schrieffer-Heeger (SSH) model, rhombohedral graphite (RG) is a potential candidate for realizing both flat bands and nontrivial topological physics. Here we report experimental evidence of topological flat bands (TFBs) on the surface of bulk RG, which are topologically protected by bulk helical Dirac nodal lines via the bulk-boundary correspondence. Moreover, upon {\it in situ} electron doping, the surface TFBs show a splitting with exotic doping evolution, with an order-of-magnitude increase in the bandwidth of the lower split band, and pinning of the upper band near the Fermi level. These experimental observations together with Hartree-Fock calculations suggest that correlation effects are important in this system. Our results demonstrate RG as a new platform for investigating the rich interplay between nontrivial band topology, correlation effects, and interaction-driven symmetry-broken states.

cond-mat.str-el↗

arXiv2024

Pair-density-wave superconductivity: a microscopic model on 2D honeycomb lattice

Pair-density-wave (PDW) is a long-sought exotic state with oscillating superconducting order without external magnetic field. So far it has been rare in establishing a 2D microscopic model with PDW long-range order in its ground state. Here we propose to study PDW superconductivity in a minimal model of spinless fermions on the honeycomb lattice with nearest-neighbor (NN) and next-nearest-neighbor (NNN) interaction $V_1$ and $V_2$, respectively. By performing a state-of-the-art density-matrix renormalization group (DMRG) study of this $t$-$V_1$-$V_2$ model at finite doping on six-leg and eight-leg honeycomb cylinders, we showed that the ground state exhibits PDW ordering (namely quasi-long-range order with a divergent PDW susceptibility). Remarkably this PDW state persists on the wider cylinder with 2D-like Fermi surfaces (FS). To the best of our knowledge, this is probably the first controlled numerical evidence of PDW in systems with 2D-like FS.

cond-mat.supr-con↗

arXiv2024

Noise-induced phase transitions in hybrid quantum circuits

The presence of quantum noises inherent to real physical systems can strongly impact the physics in hybrid quantum circuits with local random unitaries and mid-circuit measurements. The quantum noises with a size-independent occurring probability can lead to the disappearance of a measurement-induced entanglement phase transition and the emergence of a single area-law phase. In this work, we investigate the effects of quantum noises with size-dependent probabilities $q=p/L^α$ where $α$ represents the scaling exponent. We have identified a noise-induced entanglement phase transition from a volume law to a power (area) law in the presence (absence) of measurements as $p$ increases when $α=1$. With the help of an effective statistical model, we reveal that the phase transition is of first-order arising from the competition between two types of spin configurations and shares the same analytical understanding as the noise-induced coding transition. This unified picture further deepens the understanding of the connection between entanglement behavior and the capacity of information protection. When $α\neq 1$, one spin configuration always dominates regardless of $p$ and thus the phase transition disappears. Moreover, we highlight the difference between the effects of size-dependent bulk noise and boundary noises. We validate our analytical predictions with extensive numerical results from stabilizer circuit simulations.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2024

Pfaffian quantum Monte Carlo: solution to Majorana sign ambiguity and applications

Determinant quantum Monte Carlo (DQMC), formulated in complex-fermion representation, has played a key role in studying strongly-correlated fermion systems. However, its applicability is limited due to the requirement of particle-number conservation after Hubbard-Stratonovich transformation. In going beyond the conventional DQMC, one encouraging development occurred when Majorana fermions were introduced for QMC [1,2]. But in previous Majorana-based QMC, Boltzmann weight is determined often with a sign ambiguity. Here we successfully resolved this ambiguity by deriving a closed-form Pfaffian formula for the weight, enabling efficient calculation of the weight with its sign in polynomial time. We call it ''Pfaffian quantum Monte Carlo'' (PfQMC), which can be applied to generic interacting fermion models. We have successfully employed PfQMC to explore how robust Majorana edge modes in Kitaev chain are against strong interactions. By offering greater flexibility, PfQMC can potentially enhance existing sign-mitigating and approximation methods and help address challenging issues such as the ground-state properties of the doped Hubbard model.

cond-mat.str-el↗

arXiv2024

Quantum spin liquid from electron-phonon coupling

A quantum spin liquid (QSL) is an exotic insulating phase with emergent gauge fields and fractionalized excitations. However, the unambiguous demonstration of the existence of a QSL in a "non-engineered" microscopic model (or in any material) remains challenging. Here, using numerically-exact sign-problem-free quantum Monte Carlo simulations, we show that a QSL arises in a non-engineered electron-phonon model. Specifically, we investigate the ground-state phase diagram of the bond Su-Schrieffer-Heeger (SSH) model on a 2D triangular lattice at half filling (one electron per site) which we show includes a QSL phase which is fully gapped, exhibits no symmetry-breaking order, and supports deconfined fractionalized holon excitations. This suggests new routes for finding QSLs in realistic materials and high-$T_c$ superconductivity by lightly doping them.

cond-mat.str-el↗

arXiv2024

Massive 1D Dirac Line, Solitons and Reversible Manipulation on the Surface of a Prototype Obstructed Atomic Insulator, Silicon

Topologically trivial insulators can be classified into atomic insulators (AIs) and obstructed atomic insulators (OAIs) depending on whether the Wannier charge centers are localized or not at spatial positions occupied by atoms. An OAI can possess unusual properties such as surface states along certain crystalline surfaces, which advantageously appear in materials with much larger bulk energy gap than topological insulators, making them more attractive for potential applications. In this work, we show that a well-known crystal, silicon (Si) is a model OAI, which naturally explains some of Si's unusual properties such as its famous (111) surface states. On this surface, using angle resolved photoemission spectroscopy (ARPES), we reveal sharp quasi-1D massive Dirac line dispersions; we also observe, using scanning tunneling microscopy/spectroscopy (STM/STS), topological solitons at the interface of the two atomic chains. Remarkably, we show that the different chain domains can be reversibly switched at the nanometer scale, suggesting the application potential in ultra-high density storage devices.

cond-mat.mes-hall↗

arXiv2024

Systematic study of capture thresholds with time dependent Hartree-Fock theory

With the time dependent Hartree-Fock (TDHF) theory, capture thresholds $E_{\rm cap}$ for 144 fusion systems with nearly spherical nuclei are systematically studied for the first time. We find that for the reactions between doubly-magic nuclei, the calculated $E_{\rm cap}$ are very close to the extracted barrier heights from measured fusion excitation functions. For the fusion reactions with nearly spherical nuclei, an excitation energy of about 1 MeV at the capture position need to be considered to better reproduce the data due to the lower excitation threshold. The rms deviation with respect to the barrier heights is only 1.43 MeV from the TDHF calcualtions, which is smaller than the results from three empirical nuclear potentials. Together with Siwek-Wilczyński formula in which the three parameters are determined by the TDHF calculations, the measured fusion cross sections at energies around the barriers can be well reproduced for seven fusion reactions $^{40}$Ca+$^{48}$Ca, $^{16}$O+$^{208}$Pb, $^{40}$Ca+$^{90,96}$Zr, $^{28}$Si+$^{96}$Zr and $^{132}$Sn+$^{40,48}$Ca.

nucl-th↗

arXiv2024

Distinguishing fission-like events from deep-inelastic collisions

We propose two functions to distinguish fission-like events from quasi-elastic (QE) scattering and deep inelastic collisions (DIC), for a better analysis of the measured mass-total kinetic energy distributions of binary fragments formed in fusion-fission reactions. We note that the ratio of capture to DIC events evidently decreases with the decreasing of the depth of the capture pocket predicted from the Skyrme energy density functional, with which the capture pocket could be extracted from the measured mass-energy distributions. Together with the improved quantum molecular dynamics simulations, in which the typical contact time of the reaction partners is smaller than 200 fm/c for QE and is larger than 600 fm/c for fission-like events, we find that the ratio of capture to touching cross section systematically increases with the pocket depth.

nucl-th↗

arXiv2023

Variational Quantum-Neural Hybrid Error Mitigation

Quantum error mitigation (QEM) is crucial for obtaining reliable results on quantum computers by suppressing quantum noise with moderate resources. It is a key factor for successful and practical quantum algorithm implementations in the noisy intermediate scale quantum (NISQ) era. Since quantum-classical hybrid algorithms can be executed with moderate and noisy quantum resources, combining QEM with quantum-classical hybrid schemes is one of the most promising directions toward practical quantum advantages. In this work, we show how the variational quantum-neural hybrid eigensolver (VQNHE) algorithm, which seamlessly combines the expressive power of a parameterized quantum circuit with a neural network, is inherently noise resilient with a unique QEM capacity, which is absent in vanilla variational quantum eigensolvers (VQE). We carefully analyze and elucidate the asymptotic scaling of this unique QEM capacity in VQNHE from both theoretical and experimental perspectives. Finally, we propose a variational basis transformation for the Hamiltonian to be measured under the VQNHE framework, yielding a powerful tri-optimization setup, dubbed as VQNHE++. VQNHE++ can further enhance the quantum-neural hybrid expressive power and error mitigation capacity.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2023

High-temperature superconductivity induced by the Su-Schrieffer-Heeger electron-phonon coupling

Experimental quest for high-temperature and room-temperature superconductivity (SC) at ambient pressure has been a long-standing research theme in physics. It has also been desired to construct reliable microscopic mechanisms that may achieve high-temperature SC. Here we systematically explore SC in the Su-Schrieffer-Heeger (SSH) electron-phonon coupling models by performing numerically-exact quantum Monte-Carlo simulations. Our results reliably showed that superconducting $T_c$ of the SSH models is high, remarkably higher than those in the Holstein models, particularly in strong electron-phonon coupling regime. This is mainly because SSH phonons can not only induce strong pairing between electrons but also help the phase coherence of Cooper pairs, thus realizing higher $T_c$. As mechanism of higher-$T_c$ of the SSH models could be potentially relevant to realistic materials, it paves a promising way to find higher-temperature SC in the future.

cond-mat.str-el↗

arXiv2023

Mitigating the fermion sign problem by automatic differentiation

As an intrinsically unbiased method, the quantum Monte Carlo (QMC) method is of unique importance in simulating interacting quantum systems. Although the QMC method often suffers from the notorious sign problem, the sign problem of quantum models may be mitigated by finding better choices of the simulation scheme. However, a general framework for identifying optimal QMC schemes has been lacking. Here, we propose a general framework using automatic differentiation to automatically search for the best QMC scheme within a given ansatz of the Hubbard-Stratonovich transformation, which we call "automatic differentiable sign optimization" (ADSO). We apply the ADSO framework to the honeycomb lattice Hubbard model with Rashba spin-orbit coupling and demonstrate that ADSO is remarkably effective in mitigating and even solving its sign problem. Specifically, ADSO finds a sign-free point in the model which was previously thought to be sign-problematic. For the sign-free model discovered by ADSO, its ground state is shown by sign-free QMC simulations to possess spiral magnetic ordering; we also obtained the critical exponents characterizing the magnetic quantum phase transition.

cond-mat.str-el↗

arXiv2023

Systematic study of fusion barriers with energy dependent barrier radius

Considering energy dependence of the barrier radius in heavy-ion fusion reactions, a modified Siwek-Wilczyński (MSW) fusion cross section formula is proposed. With the MSW formula, the fusion barrier parameters for 367 reaction systems are systematically extracted, based on 443 datasets of measured cross sections. We find that the fusion excitation functions for about $60\%$ reaction systems can be better described by introducing the energy dependence of the barrier radius which is due to the dynamical effects at energies near and below the barrier. Considering both the influence of the geometry radii and that of the reduced de Broglie wavelength of the colliding nuclei, the barrier heights are well reproduced with only one model parameter. The extracted barrier radius parameters linearly decrease with the effective fissility parameter, and the width of the barrier distribution relates to the barrier height and as well as the reduced de Broglie wavelength at energies around the Coulomb barrier.

nucl-th↗

arXiv2023

New critical states induced by measurement

Finding new critical states of matter is an important subject in modern many-body physics. Here we study the effect of measurement and postselection on the critical ground state of a Luttinger liquid theory and show that it can lead to qualitatively new critical states. Depending on the Luttinger parameter $K$, the effect of measurement is irrelevant (relevant) at $K>1$ ($K<1$). We reveal that this causes an entanglement transition between two phases, one with logarithmic entanglement entropy for a subregion ($K>1$), and the other with algebraic entanglement entropy ($K<1$). At the critical point $K=1$, the measurement is marginal, and we find new critical states whose entanglement entropy exhibits a logarithmic behavior with a continuous effective central charge as a function of measurement strength. We also performed numerical density matrix renormalization group and fermionic Gaussian state simulations to support our results. We further discuss promising and feasible routes to experimentally realize new critical states in our work.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2023

Discrete time crystal enabled by Stark many-body localization

Discrete time crystal (DTC) has recently attracted increasing attention, but most DTC models and their properties are only revealed after disorder average. In this Letter, we propose a simple disorder-free periodically driven model that exhibits nontrivial DTC order stabilized by Stark many-body localization (MBL). We demonstrate the existence of DTC phase by analytical analysis from perturbation theory and convincing numerical evidence from observable dynamics. The new DTC model paves a new promising way for further experiments and deepens our understanding of DTC. Since the DTC order doesn't require special quantum state preparation and the strong disorder average, it can be naturally realized on the noisy intermediate-scale quantum (NISQ) hardware with much fewer resources and repetitions. Moreover, besides the robust subharmonic response, there are other novel robust beating oscillations in Stark-MBL DTC phase which are absent in random or quasi-periodic MBL DTC.

cond-mat.str-el↗

arXiv2023

Training variational quantum algorithms with random gate activation

Variational quantum algorithms (VQAs) hold great potentials for near-term applications and are promising to achieve quantum advantage on practical tasks. However, VQAs suffer from severe barren plateau problem as well as have a large probability of being trapped in local minima. In this Letter, we propose a novel training algorithm with random quantum gate activation for VQAs to efficiently address these two issues. This new algorithm processes effectively much fewer training parameters than the conventional plain optimization strategy, which efficiently mitigates barren plateaus with the same expressive capability. Additionally, by randomly adding two-qubit gates to the circuit ansatz, the optimization trajectories can escape from local minima and reach the global minimum more frequently due to more sources of randomness. In real quantum experiments, the new training algorithm can also reduce the quantum computational resources required and be more quantum noise resilient. We apply our training algorithm to solve variational quantum simulation problems for ground states and present convincing results that showcase the advantages of our novel strategy where better performance is achieved by the combination of mitigating barren plateaus, escaping from local minima, and reducing the effect of quantum noises. We further propose that the entanglement phase transition could be one underlying reason why our RA training is so effective.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2023

Probing many-body localization by excited-state VQE

Non-equilibrium physics including many-body localization (MBL) has attracted increasing attentions, but theoretical approaches of reliably studying non-equilibrium properties remain quite limited. In this Letter, we propose a systematic approach to probe MBL phases via the excited-state variational quantum eigensolver (VQE) and demonstrate convincing results of MBL on a quantum hardware, which we believe paves a promising way for future simulations of non-equilibrium systems beyond the reach of classical computations in the noisy intermediate-scale quantum (NISQ) era. Moreover, the MBL probing protocol based on excited-state VQE is NISQ-friendly, as it can successfully differentiate the MBL phase from thermal phases with relatively-shallow quantum circuits, and it is also robust against the effect of quantum noises.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2023

TensorCircuit: a Quantum Software Framework for the NISQ Era

TensorCircuit is an open source quantum circuit simulator based on tensor network contraction, designed for speed, flexibility and code efficiency. Written purely in Python, and built on top of industry-standard machine learning frameworks, TensorCircuit supports automatic differentiation, just-in-time compilation, vectorized parallelism and hardware acceleration. These features allow TensorCircuit to simulate larger and more complex quantum circuits than existing simulators, and are especially suited to variational algorithms based on parameterized quantum circuits. TensorCircuit enables orders of magnitude speedup for various quantum simulation tasks compared to other common quantum software, and can simulate up to 600 qubits with moderate circuit depth and low-dimensional connectivity. With its time and space efficiency, flexible and extensible architecture and compact, user-friendly API, TensorCircuit has been built to facilitate the design, simulation and analysis of quantum algorithms in the Noisy Intermediate-Scale Quantum (NISQ) era.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2022

Magic-angle Twisted Bilayer Systems with Quadratic-Band-Touching: Exactly Flat Bands with High-Chern Number

Studies of twisted moiré systems have been mainly focused on two-dimensional (2D) materials such as graphene with Dirac points and transition-metal-dichalcogenide so far. Here we propose a twisted bilayer of 2D systems which feature stable quadratic-band-touching points and find exotic physics different from previously studied twisted moiré systems. Specifically, we show that exactly flat bands can emerge at magic angles and, more interestingly, each flat band exhibits a high Chern number ($C=\pm 2$). We further consider the effect of Coulomb interactions in such magic-angle twisted systems and find that the ground state supports the quantum anomalous Hall effect with quantized Hall conductivity $2\frac{e^2}{hc}$ at certain filling. Furthermore, the possible physical realization of such twisted bilayer systems will be briefly discussed.

cond-mat.str-el↗