arXiv subjects

Jörg Schmiedmayer

Publications and source records attributed to Jörg Schmiedmayer.

At least 37 records · Page 2Linked to original sources

arXiv2025

Experimentally probing Landauer's principle in the quantum many-body regime

Landauer's principle bridges information theory and thermodynamics by linking the entropy change of a system during a process to the average energy dissipated to its environment. Although typically discussed in the context of erasing a single bit of information, Landauer's principle can be generalised to characterise irreversibility in out-of-equilibrium processes, such as those involving complex quantum many-body systems. Specifically, the relationship between the entropy change of the system and the energy dissipated to its environment can be decomposed into changes in quantum mutual information and a difference in relative entropies of the environment. Here we experimentally probe Landauer's principle in the quantum many-body regime using a quantum field simulator of ultracold Bose gases. Employing a dynamical tomographic reconstruction scheme, we track the temporal evolution of the quantum field following a global mass quench from a massive to massless Klein-Gordon model and analyse the thermodynamic and information-theoretic contributions to a generalised entropy production for various system-environment partitions of the composite system. Our results verify the quantum field theoretical calculations, interpreted using a semi-classical quasiparticle picture. Our work demonstrates the ability of ultracold atom-based quantum field simulators to experimentally investigate quantum thermodynamics.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2025

Systematic analysis of relative phase extraction in one-dimensional Bose gases interferometry

Spatially resolved relative phase measurement of two adjacent 1D Bose gases is enabled by matter-wave interference upon free expansion. However, longitudinal dynamics is typically ignored in the analysis of experimental data. We provide an analytical formula showing a correction to the readout of the relative phase due to longitudinal expansion and mixing with the common phase. We numerically assess the error propagation to the estimation of the gases' physical quantities such as correlation functions and temperature. Our work characterizes the reliability and robustness of interferometric measurements, directing us to the improvement of existing phase extraction methods necessary to observe new physical phenomena in cold-atomic quantum simulators.

cond-mat.quant-gas↗

arXiv2025

Measurement of total phase fluctuation in cold-atomic quantum simulators

Studying the dynamics of quantum many-body systems is often constrained by the limitations in probing relevant observables, especially in continuous systems. A powerful method to gain information about such systems is the reconstruction of local currents from the continuity equation. We show that this approach can be used to extract the total phase fluctuation of adjacent Bose gases. We validate our technique numerically and demonstrate its effectiveness by analyzing data from selected experiments simulating 1D quantum field theories through the phase difference of two parallel 1D Bose gases. This analysis reveals the previously hidden sector of the sum mode of the phase, which is important for studying long-time thermalization and out-of-equilibrium dynamics of the system. Our method is general and can be applied to other cold atom systems with spatial phase gradients, thereby expanding the scope and capabilities of cold-atomic quantum simulators.

cond-mat.quant-gas↗

arXiv2024

Quantum-limited generalized measurement for tunnel-coupled condensates

The efficient readout of the relevant information is pivotal for quantum simulation experiments. Often only single observables are accessed by performing standard projective measurements. In this work, we implement a generalized measurement scheme based on controlled outcoupling of atoms. This gives us simultaneous access to number imbalance and relative phase in a system of two tunnel-coupled 1D Bose gases, which realize a quantum simulator of the sine-Gordon field theory. We demonstrate that our measurement is quantum limited by accessing number squeezing and show that we can track Josephson oscillation dynamics with the generalized measurements. Finally, we show that the scheme allows the extraction of atoms while maintaining the system's coherent dynamics, which opens up the door to accessing multi-time correlation functions. Our scheme constitutes a step towards accessing quantum properties of the sine-Gordon field theory and, in the future, studying spatially extended systems under continuous monitoring.

cond-mat.quant-gas↗

arXiv2024

Characterising transport in a quantum gas by measuring Drude weights

Transport properties play a crucial role in defining materials as insulators, metals, or superconductors. A fundamental parameter in this regard is the Drude weight, which quantify the ballistic transport of charge carriers. In this work, we measure the Drude weights of an ultracold gas of interacting bosonic atoms confined to one dimension, characterising the induced atomic and energy currents in response to perturbations with an external potential. We induce currents through two distinct experimental protocols; by applying a constant force to the gas, and by joining two subsystems prepared in different equilibrium states. By virtue of integrability, dynamics of the system is governed by ballistically propagating, long-lived quasi-particle excitations, whereby Drude weights almost fully characterise large-scale transport. Indeed, our results align with predictions from a recently developed hydrodynamic theory, demonstrating almost fully dissipationless transport, even at finite temperatures and interactions. These findings not only provide experimental validation of the hydrodynamic predictions but also offer methodologies applicable to various condensed matter systems, facilitating further studies on the transport properties of strongly correlated quantum matter.

cond-mat.quant-gas↗

arXiv2024

Matter-wave interferometers with trapped strongly interacting Feshbach molecules

We implement two types of matter-wave interferometers using trapped Bose-condensed Feshbach molecules, from weak to strong interactions. In each case, we focus on investigating interaction effects and their implications for the performance. In the Ramsey-type interferometer where interference between the two motional quantum states in an optical lattice is observed, interparticle interactions are found to induce energy shifts in the states. Consequently, this results in a reduction of the interferometer frequency and introduces a phase shift during the lattice pulses used for state manipulation. Furthermore, nonuniformity leads to dephasing and collisional effects contribute to the degradation of contrast. In the Michelson-type interferometer, where matter waves are spatially split and recombined in a waveguide, interference is observed in the presence of significant interaction, however coherence degrades with increasing interaction strength. Notably, coherence is also observed in thermal clouds, indicating the white-light nature of the implemented Michelson-type interferometer.

cond-mat.quant-gas↗

arXiv2024

Hydrogen crystals reduce dissipation in superconducting resonators

We show that the internal quality factors of high impedance superconducting resonators made of granular aluminum can be improved by coating them with micrometric films of solid para-hydrogen molecular crystals. We attribute the average measured $\approx 8\%$ reduction in dissipation to absorption of stray terahertz radiation at the crystal-resonator interface and the subsequent dissipation of its energy in the form of phonons below the pair-breaking gap. Our results prove that, contrary to expectations, replacing the vacuum dielectric atop a superconducting resonator can be beneficial, thanks to the added protection against Cooper pair-braking terahertz radiation. Moreover, at the level of internal quality factors in the $10^5$ range, the hydrogen crystal does not introduce additional losses, which is promising for embedding impurities to couple to superconducting thin-film devices in hybrid quantum architectures.

cond-mat.supr-con↗

arXiv2024

Identifying diffusive length scales in one-dimensional Bose gases

In the hydrodynamics of integrable models, diffusion is a subleading correction to ballistic propagation. Here we quantify the diffusive contribution for one-dimensional Bose gases and find it most influential in the crossover between the main thermodynamic regimes of the gas. Analysing the experimentally measured dynamics of a single density mode, we find diffusion to be relevant only for high wavelength excitations. Instead, the observed relaxation is solely caused by a ballistically driven dephasing process, whose time scale is related to the phonon lifetime of the system and is thus useful to evaluate the applicability of the phonon bases typically used in quantum field simulators.

cond-mat.quant-gas↗

arXiv2024

Squeezing oscillations in a multimode bosonic Josephson junction

Quantum simulators built from ultracold atoms promise to study quantum phenomena in interacting many-body systems. However, it remains a challenge to experimentally prepare strongly correlated continuous systems such that the properties are dominated by quantum fluctuations. Here, we show how to enhance the quantum correlations in a one-dimensional multimode bosonic Josephson junction, which is a quantum simulator of the sine-Gordon field theory. Our approach is based on the ability to track the non-equilibrium dynamics of quantum properties. After creating a bosonic Josephson junction at the stable fixed point of the classical phase space, we observe squeezing oscillations in the two conjugate variables. We show that the squeezing oscillation frequency can be tuned by more than one order of magnitude, and we are able to achieve a spin squeezing close to 10 dB by utilising these oscillatory dynamics. The impact of improved spin squeezing is directly revealed by detecting enhanced spatial phase correlations between decoupled condensates. Our work provides new ways for engineering correlations and entanglement in the external degree of freedom of interacting many-body systems.

cond-mat.quant-gas↗

arXiv2024

Hamiltonian Learning in Quantum Field Theories

We discuss Hamiltonian learning in quantum field theories as a protocol for systematically extracting the operator content and coupling constants of effective field theory Hamiltonians from experimental data. Learning the Hamiltonian for varying spatial measurement resolutions gives access to field theories at different energy scales, and allows to learn a flow of Hamiltonians reminiscent of the renormalization group. Our method, which we demonstrate in both theoretical studies and available data from a quantum gas experiment, promises new ways of addressing the emergence of quantum field theories in quantum simulation experiments.

cond-mat.quant-gas↗

arXiv2023

The Whitham approach to Generalized Hydrodynamics

The formation of dispersive shock waves in the one-dimensional Bose gas represents a limitation of Generalized Hydrodynamics (GHD) due to the coarse-grained nature of the theory. Nevertheless, GHD accurately captures the long wavelength behavior indicating an implicit knowledge of the underlying microscopic physics. Such representation are already known through the Whitham modulation theory, where dispersion-less equations describe the evolution of the slowly varying shock wave parameters. Here we study the correspondence between Whithams approach to the Gross-Pitaevskii equation and GHD in the semi-classical limit. Our findings enable the recovery of the shock wave solution directly from GHD simulations, which we demonstrate for both zero and finite temperature. Additionally, we study how free expansion protocols affect the shock wave density and their implications for experimental detection. The combined picture of Whitham and GHD lends itself to additional physical interpretation regarding the formation of shock waves. Further, this picture exhibits clear analogies to the theory of Quantum GHD, and we discuss possible routes to establish an explicit connection between them.

cond-mat.stat-mech↗

arXiv2023

Generalized hydrodynamics: a perspective

Conventional hydrodynamics describes systems with few long-lived excitations. In one dimension, however, many experimentally relevant systems feature a large number of long-lived excitations even at high temperature, because they are proximate to integrable limits. Such models cannot be treated using conventional hydrodynamics. The framework of generalized hydrodynamics (GHD) was recently developed to treat the dynamics of one-dimensional models: it combines ideas from integrability, hydrodynamics, and kinetic theory to come up with a quantitative theory of transport. GHD has successfully settled several longstanding questions about one-dimensional transport; it has also been leveraged to study dynamical questions beyond the transport of conserved quantities, and to systems that are not integrable. In this article we introduce the main ideas and predictions of GHD, survey some of the most recent theoretical extensions and experimental tests of the GHD framework, and discuss some open questions in transport that the GHD perspective might elucidate.

cond-mat.stat-mech↗

arXiv2023

Triggered Superradiance and Inversion Storage in a Hybrid Quantum System

We study the superradiant emission of an inverted spin ensemble strongly coupled to a superconducting cavity. After fast inversion, we detune the spins from the cavity and store the inversion for tens of milliseconds, during which the remaining transverse spin components disappear. Switching back on resonance enables us to study the onset of superradiance. A weak trigger pulse of a few hundred photons shifts the superradiant burst to earlier times and imprints its phase onto the emitted radiation. For long hold times, the inversion decreases below the threshold for spontaneous superradiance. There, the energy stored in the ensemble can be used to amplify microwave pulses passing through the cavity.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2023

Testing collapse models with Bose-Einstein-Condensate interferometry

The model of continuous spontaneous localization (CSL) is the most prominent consistent modification of quantum mechanics predicting an objective quantum-to-classical transition. Here we show that precision interferometry with Bose-Einstein condensed atoms can serve to lower the current empirical bound on the localization rate parameter by several orders of magnitude. This works by focusing on the atom count distributions rather than just mean population imbalances in the interferometric signal of squeezed BECs, without the need for highly entangled GHZ-like states. In fact, the interplay between CSL-induced diffusion and dispersive atom-atom interactions results in an amplified sensitivity of the condensate to CSL. We discuss experimentally realistic measurement schemes utilizing state-of-the-art experimental techniques to test new regions of parameter space and, pushed to the limit, to probe and potentially rule out large relevant parameter regimes of CSL.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2023

Optimal control of quasi-1D Bose gases in optical box potentials

In this paper, we investigate the manipulation of quasi-1D Bose gases that are trapped in a highly elongated potential by optimal control methods. The effective meanfield dynamics of the gas can be described by a one-dimensional non-polynomial Schrödinger equation. We extend the indirect optimal control method for the Gross-Pitaevskii equation by Winckel and Borzi (2008) to obtain necessary optimality conditions for state and energy cost functionals. This approach is then applied to optimally compress a quasi-1D Bose gase in an (optical) box potential, i.e., to find a so-called short-cut to adiabaticity, by solving the optimality conditions numerically. The behavior of the proposed method is finally analyzed and compared to simple direct optimization strategies using reduced basis functions. Simulations results demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed approach.

eess.SY↗

arXiv2023

Optimizing optical potentials with physics-inspired learning algorithms

We present our new experimental and theoretical framework which combines a broadband superluminescent diode (SLED/SLD) with fast learning algorithms to provide speed and accuracy improvements for the optimization of 1D optical dipole potentials, here generated with a Digital Micromirror Device (DMD). To characterize the setup and potential speckle patterns arising from coherence, we compare the superluminescent diode to a single-mode laser by investigating interference properties. We employ Machine Learning (ML) tools to train a physics-inspired model acting as a digital twin of the optical system predicting the behavior of the optical apparatus including all its imperfections. Implementing an iterative algorithm based on Iterative Learning Control (ILC) we optimize optical potentials an order of magnitude faster than heuristic optimization methods. We compare iterative model-based offline optimization and experimental feedback-based online optimization. Our methods provide a new route to fast optimization of optical potentials which is relevant for the dynamical manipulation of ultracold gases.

cond-mat.quant-gas↗

arXiv2023

Unruh and analogue Unruh temperatures for circular motion in 3+1 and 2+1 dimensions

The Unruh effect states that a uniformly linearly accelerated observer with proper acceleration $a$ experiences Minkowski vacuum as a thermal state in the temperature $T_{\text{lin}} = a/(2π)$, operationally measurable via the detailed balance condition between excitation and de-excitation probabilities. An observer in uniform circular motion experiences a similar Unruh-type temperature $T_{\text{circ}}$, operationally measurable via the detailed balance condition, but $T_{\text{circ}}$ depends not just on the proper acceleration but also on the orbital radius and on the excitation energy. We establish analytic results for $T_{\text{circ}}$ for a massless scalar field in $3+1$ and $2+1$ spacetime dimensions in several asymptotic regions of the parameter space, and we give numerical results in the interpolating regions. In the ultrarelativistic limit, we verify that in $3+1$ dimensions $T_{\text{circ}}$ is of the order of $T_{\text{lin}}$ uniformly in the energy, as previously found by Unruh, but in $2+1$ dimensions $T_{\text{circ}}$ is significantly lower at low energies. We translate these results to an analogue spacetime nonrelativistic field theory in which the circular acceleration effects may become experimentally testable in the near future. We establish in particular that the circular motion analogue Unruh temperature grows arbitrarily large in the near-sonic limit, encouragingly for the experimental prospects, but the growth is weaker in effective spacetime dimension $2+1$ than in $3+1$.

gr-qc↗

arXiv2023

Experimental verification of the area law of mutual information in a quantum field simulator

Theoretical understanding of the scaling of entropies and the mutual information has led to significant advances in the research of correlated states of matter, quantum field theory, and gravity. Measuring von Neumann entropy in quantum many-body systems is challenging as it requires complete knowledge of the density matrix. In this work, we measure the von Neumann entropy of spatially extended subsystems in an ultra-cold atom simulator of one-dimensional quantum field theories. We experimentally verify one of the fundamental properties of equilibrium states of gapped quantum many-body systems, the area law of quantum mutual information. We also study the dependence of mutual information on temperature and the separation between the subsystems. Our work is a crucial step toward employing ultra-cold atom simulators to probe entanglement in quantum field theories.

cond-mat.quant-gas↗