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Maciej Lewenstein

Publications and source records attributed to Maciej Lewenstein.

At least 163 records · Page 9Linked to original sources

Quantum Heat Engines with Carnot Efficiency at Maximum Power

Heat engines constitute the major building blocks of modern technologies. However, conventional heat engines with higher power yield lesser efficiency and vice versa and respect various power-efficiency trade-off relations. This is also assumed to be true for the engines operating in the quantum regime. Here we show that these relations are not fundamental. We introduce quantum heat engines that deliver maximum power with Carnot efficiency in the one-shot finite-size regime. These engines are composed of working systems with a finite number of quantum particles and are restricted to one-shot measurements. The engines operate in a one-step cycle by letting the working system simultaneously interact with hot and cold baths via semi-local thermal operations. By allowing quantum entanglement between its constituents and, thereby, a coherent transfer of heat from hot to cold baths, the engine implements the fastest possible reversible state transformation in each cycle, resulting in maximum power and Carnot efficiency. Finally, we propose a physically realizable engine using quantum optical systems.

quant-ph↗

Phase diagram of 1+1D Abelian-Higgs model and its critical point

We determine the phase diagram of the Abelian-Higgs model in one spatial dimension and time (1+1D) on a lattice. We identify a line of first order phase transitions separating the Higgs region from the confined one. This line terminates in a quantum critical point above which the two regions are connected by a smooth crossover. We analyze the critical point and find compelling evidences for its description as the product of two non-interacting systems, a massless free fermion and a massless free boson. However, we find also some surprizing results that cannot be explained by our simple picture, suggesting this newly discovered critical point to be an unusual one.

hep-th↗

Detecting Majorana Zero Modes via Strong Field Dynamics

We propose a protocol to detect topological phase transitions of one-dimensional $p$-wave superconductors from their harmonic emission spectrum in strong fields. Specifically, we identify spectral features due to radiating edge modes, which characterize the spectrum and the density of states in the topological phase, and which are absent in the trivial phase. These features allow us to define an order parameter, obtained from emission measurements, that unambiguously differentiates between the two phases. Local probing provides insight to the localized and topologically protected nature of the modes. The presented results establish that high harmonic spectroscopy can be used as a novel all-optical tool for the detection of Majorana zero modes.

cond-mat.mes-hall↗

Efficient Simulation of Quantum Many-body Thermodynamics by Tailoring Zero-temperature Tensor Network

Numerical annealing and renormalization group have conceived various successful approaches to study the thermodynamics of strongly-correlated systems where perturbation or expansion theories fail to work. As the process of lowering the temperatures is usually involved in different manners, these approaches in general become much less efficient or accurate at the low temperatures. In this work, we propose to access the finite-temperature properties from the tensor network (TN) representing the zero-temperature partition function. We propose to "scissor" a finite part from such an infinite-size TN, and "stitch" it to possess the periodic boundary condition along the imaginary-time direction. We dub this approach as TN tailoring. Exceptional accuracy is achieved with a fine-tune process, surpassing the previous methods including the linearized tensor renormalization group [Phys. Rev. Lett. 106, 127202 (2011)], continuous matrix product operator [Phys. Rev. Lett. 125, 170604 (2020)], and etc. High efficiency is demonstrated, where the time cost is nearly independent of the target temperature including the extremely-low temperatures. The proposed idea can be extended to higher-dimensional systems of bosons and fermions.

quant-ph↗

Topological quantum critical points in the extended Bose-Hubbard model

The combination of topology and quantum criticality can give rise to an exotic mix of counterintuitive effects. Here, we show that unexpected topological properties take place in a paradigmatic strongly-correlated Hamiltonian: the 1D extended Bose-Hubbard model. In particular, we reveal the presence of two distinct topological quantum critical points with localized edge states and gapless bulk excitations. Our results show that the topological critical points separate two phases, one topologically protected and the other topologically trivial, both characterized by a long-range ordered string correlation function. The long-range order persists also at the topological critical points and it reflects the presence of localized edge states protected by a finite charge gap. Finally, we introduce a super-resolution quantum gas microscopy scheme for dipolar dysprosium atoms, which provides a reliable route towards the experimental study of topological quantum critical points.

cond-mat.quant-gas↗

Linking topological features of the Hofstadter model to optical diffraction figures

In two, three and even four spatial dimensions, the transverse responses experienced by a charged particle on a lattice in a uniform magnetic field are fully controlled by topological invariants called Chern numbers, which characterize the energy bands of the underlying Hofstadter Hamiltonian. These remarkable features, solely arising from the magnetic translational symmetry, are captured by Diophantine equations which relate the fraction of occupied states, the magnetic flux and the Chern numbers of the system bands. Here we investigate the close analogy between the topological properties of Hofstadter Hamiltonians and the diffraction figures resulting from optical gratings. In particular, we show that there is a one-to-one relation between the above mentioned Diophantine equation and the Bragg condition determining the far-field positions of the optical diffraction peaks. As an interesting consequence of this mapping, we discuss how the robustness of diffraction figures to structural disorder in the grating is a direct analogue of the robustness of transverse conductance in the Quantum Hall effect.

cond-mat.mes-hall↗

High harmonic spectroscopy of quantum phase transitions in a high-T$_c$ superconductor

We report on the new non--linear optical signatures of quantum phase transitions in the high-temperature superconductor YBCO, observed through high harmonic generation. While the linear optical response of the material is largely unchanged when cooling across the phase transitions, the nonlinear optical response sensitively imprints two critical points, one at the critical temperature of the cuprate with the exponential growth of the surface harmonic yield in the superconducting phase, and another critical point, which marks the transition from strange metal to pseudo gap phase. To reveal the underlying microscopic quantum dynamics, a novel strong-field quasi-Hubbard model was developed, which describes the measured optical response dependent on the formation of Cooper pairs. Further, the new theory provides insight into the carrier scattering dynamics and allows to differentiate between the superconducting, pseudo gap, and strange metal phases. The direct connection between non--linear optical response and microscopic dynamics provides a powerful new methodology to study quantum phase transitions in correlated materials. Further implications are light-wave control over intricate quantum phases, light-matter hybrids, and application for optical quantum computing.

cond-mat.supr-con↗

Effects of electronic correlation on the high harmonic generation in helium: a time-dependent configuration interaction singles vs time-dependent full configuration interaction study

In this paper, we investigate the effects of full electronic correlation on the high harmonic generation in the helium atom subjected to laser pulses of extremely high intensity. To do this, we perform real-time propagations of the helium atom wavefunction using quantum chemistry methods coupled to Gaussian basis sets. The calculations are done within the real-time time-dependent configuration interaction framework, at two levels of theory: time-dependent configuration interation with single excitations (TD-CIS, uncorrelated method) and time-dependent full configuration interaction (TD-FCI, fully correlated method), and analyse obtained HHG spectra. The electronic wavefunction is expanded in Dunning basis sets supplemented with functions adapted to describing highly excited continuum states. We also compare the TD-CI results with grid-based propagations of the helium atom within the single-active-electron approximation. Our results show when including the dynamical electron correlation, a noticeable improvement to the description of HHG can be achieved, in terms of e.g. a more constant intensity in the lower energy part of the harmonic plateau. However, such effects can be captured only if the basis set used suffices to reproduce the most basic features, such as the HHG cutoff position, at the uncorrelated level of theory.

physics.chem-ph↗

Entanglement of Orbital Angular Momentum in Non-Sequential Double Ionization

We demonstrate entanglement between the orbital angular momentum (OAM) of two photoelectrons ionized via the strongly correlated process of non-sequential double ionization (NSDI). Due to the quantization of OAM, this entanglement is easily quantified and has a simple physical interpretation in terms of conservation laws. We explore detection by an entanglement witness, decomposable into local measurements, which strongly reduces the difficulty of experimental implementation. We compute the logarithmic negativity measure, which is directly applicable to mixed states, to demonstrate that the entanglement is robust to incoherent effects such as focal averaging. Using the strong-field approximation, we quantify the entanglement for a large range of targets and field parameters, isolating the best targets for experimentalists. The methodology presented here provides a general way to use OAM to quantify and, in principle, measure entanglement, that is well-suited to attosecond processes, can enhance our understanding and may be exploited in imaging processes or the generation of OAM-entangled electrons.

physics.atom-ph↗

Supersolid-Superfluid phase separation in the extended Bose-Hubbard model

Recent studies have suggested a new phase in the extended Bose-Hubbard model in one dimension at integer filling [1,2]. In this work, we show that this new phase is phase-separated into a supersolid and superfluid part, generated by mechanical instability. Numerical simulations are performed by means of the density matrix renormalization group algorithm in terms of matrix product states. In the phase-separated phase and the adjacent homogeneous superfluid and supersolid phases, we find peculiar spatial patterns in the entanglement spectrum and string-order correlation functions and show that they survive in the thermodynamic limit. In particular, we demonstrate that the elementary excitations of the homogeneous superfluid with enhanced periodic modulations are phonons, find the central charge to be $c=1$, and show that the velocity of sound, extracted from the intrinsic level splitting for finite systems, matches with the propagation velocity of local excitations in dynamical simulations. This suggests that the low-energy spectrum of the phase under investigation is effectively captured by a spinless Luttinger liquid, for which we find consistent results between the Luttinger parameter obtained from the linear dependence of the structure factor and the algebraic decay of the one-body density matrix.

cond-mat.quant-gas↗

Detecting ergodic bubbles at the crossover to many-body localization using neural networks

The transition between ergodic and many-body localized phases is expected to occur via an avalanche mechanism, in which \emph{ergodic bubbles} that arise due to local fluctuations in system properties thermalize their surroundings leading to delocalization of the system, unless the disorder is sufficiently strong to stop this process. We propose an algorithm based on neural networks that allows to detect the ergodic bubbles using experimentally measurable two-site correlation functions. Investigating time evolution of the system, we observe a logarithmic in time growth of the ergodic bubbles in the MBL regime. The distribution of the size of ergodic bubbles converges during time evolution to an exponentially decaying distribution in the MBL regime, and a power-law distribution with a thermal peak in the critical regime, supporting thus the scenario of delocalization through the avalanche mechanism. Our algorithm permits to pin-point quantitative differences in time evolution of systems with random and quasiperiodic potentials, as well as to identify rare (Griffiths) events. Our results open new pathways in studies of the mechanisms of thermalization of disordered many-body systems and beyond.

cond-mat.dis-nn↗

Confinement and lack of thermalization after quenches in the bosonic Schwinger model

We excite the vacuum of a relativistic theory of bosons coupled to a $U(1)$ gauge field in 1+1 dimensions (bosonic Schwinger model) out of equilibrium by creating a spatially separated particle-antiparticle pair connected by a string of electric field. During the evolution, we observe a strong confinement of bosons witnessed by the bending of their light cone, reminiscent of what has been observed for the Ising model [Nat. Phys. 13, 246 (2017)]. As a consequence, for the time scales we are able to simulate, the system evades thermalization and generates exotic asymptotic states. These states are made of two disjoint regions, an external deconfined region that seems to thermalize, and an inner core that reveals an area-law saturation of the entanglement entropy.

cond-mat.stat-mech↗

Fermionic Chern insulator from twisted light with linear polarization

The breaking of time-reversal symmetry is a crucial ingredient to topological bands. It can occur intrisically in materials with magnetic order, or be induced by external fields, such as magnetic fields in quantum Hall systems, or circularly polarized light fields in Floquet Chern insulators. Apart from polarization, photons can carry another degree of freedom, orbital angular momentum, through which time-reversal symmetry can be broken. In this Letter, we pose the question whether this property allows for inducing topological bands via a linearly polarized but twisted light beam. To this end, we study a graphene-like model of electrons on a honeycomb lattice interacting with a twisted light field. To identify topological behavior of the electrons, we calculate their local markers of Chern number, and monitor the presence of in-gap edge states. Our results are shown to be fully analogous to the behavior found in paradigmatic models for static and driven Chern insulators, and realizing the state is experimentally straightforward. With this, our work establishes a new mechanism for generating Fermionic topological phases of matter that can harness the central phase singularity of an optical vortex beam.

cond-mat.mes-hall↗

Applications of Quantum Randomness: From Rabi Oscillations to Fourier Axis Controlling the Musical Timbre

Randomness has attracted great interest in the field of music composition for quite some time. As early as 1962, Iannis Xenakis started exploring a stochastic approach to randomness by using computer-based interlinking probability functions to determine compositional structure, pitches and their durations. Soon after, composers and music technologists started to explore randomness with various methods of algorithmic compositions, sometimes with the help of artificial intelligence. However, in most cases, the source of randomness they used was in fact deterministic in nature. That is to say, the random numbers that they employed are imperfect in the strict sense (simply put, perfect random numbers never have repeating patterns). Moreover, the method in which they produced such randomness was extrinsic to the method in which randomness was applied. In this project, we attempt to take a further step by directly producing sound events from the genuine quantum true randomness of quantum physical systems. Through this method, we aim at achieving a new sense of aesthetic effect in music which derives from the true randomness that prevails in the natural quantum world.

quant-ph↗

Inferring Nonlinear Many-Body Bell Inequalities From Average Two-Body Correlations: Systematic Approach for Arbitrary Spin-j Ensembles

Violating Bell's inequalities (BIs) allows one to certify the preparation of entangled states from minimal assumptions -- in a device-independent manner. Finding BIs tailored to many-body correlations as prepared in present-day quantum computers and simulators is however a highly challenging endeavour. In this work, we focus on BIs violated by very coarse-grain features of the system: two-body correlations averaged over all permutations of the parties. For two-outcomes measurements, specific BIs of this form have been theoretically and experimentally studied in the past, but it is practically impossible to explicitly test all such BIs. Data-driven methods -- reconstructing a violated BI from the data themselves -- have therefore been considered. Here, inspired by statistical physics, we develop a novel data-driven approach specifically tailored to such coarse-grain data. Our approach offers two main improvements over the existing literature: 1) it is directly designed for any number of outcomes and settings; 2) the obtained BIs are quadratic in the data, offering a fundamental scaling advantage for the precision required in experiments. This very flexible method, whose complexity does not scale with the system size, allows us to systematically improve over all previously-known Bell's inequalities robustly violated by ensembles of quantum spin-$1/2$; and to discover novel families of Bell's inequalities, tailored to spin-squeezed states and many-body spin singlets of arbitrary spin-$j$ ensembles.

quant-ph↗

Unsupervised learning of anomalous diffusion data

The characterization of diffusion processes is a keystone in our understanding of a variety of physical phenomena. Many of these deviate from Brownian motion, giving rise to anomalous diffusion. Various theoretical models exists nowadays to describe such processes, but their application to experimental setups is often challenging, due to the stochastic nature of the phenomena and the difficulty to harness reliable data. The latter often consists on short and noisy trajectories, which are hard to characterize with usual statistical approaches. In recent years, we have witnessed an impressive effort to bridge theory and experiments by means of supervised machine learning techniques, with astonishing results. In this work, we explore the use of unsupervised methods in anomalous diffusion data. We show that the main diffusion characteristics can be learnt without the need of any labelling of the data. We use such method to discriminate between anomalous diffusion models and extract their physical parameters. Moreover, we explore the feasibility of finding novel types of diffusion, in this case represented by compositions of existing diffusion models. At last, we showcase the use of the method in experimental data and demonstrate its advantages for cases where supervised learning is not applicable.

cond-mat.stat-mech↗

Hessian-based toolbox for reliable and interpretable machine learning in physics

Machine learning (ML) techniques applied to quantum many-body physics have emerged as a new research field. While the numerical power of this approach is undeniable, the most expressive ML algorithms, such as neural networks, are black boxes: The user does neither know the logic behind the model predictions nor the uncertainty of the model predictions. In this work, we present a toolbox for interpretability and reliability, agnostic of the model architecture. In particular, it provides a notion of the influence of the input data on the prediction at a given test point, an estimation of the uncertainty of the model predictions, and an extrapolation score for the model predictions. Such a toolbox only requires a single computation of the Hessian of the training loss function. Our work opens the road to the systematic use of interpretability and reliability methods in ML applied to physics and, more generally, science.

quant-ph↗

New schemes for creating large optical Schrodinger cat states using strong laser fields

Recently, using conditioning approaches on the high-harmonic generation process induced by intense laser-atom interactions, we have developed a new method for the generation of optical Schrödinger cat states (M. Lewenstein et al., arXiv:2008.10221 (2020)). These quantum optical states have been proven to be very manageable as, by modifying the conditions under which harmonics are generated, one can interplay between $\textit{kitten}$ and $\textit{genuine cat}$ states. Here, we demonstrate that this method can also be used for the development of new schemes towards the creation of optical Schrödinger cat states, consisting of the superposition of three distinct coherent states. Apart from the interest these kind of states have on their own, we additionally propose a scheme for using them towards the generation of large cat states involving the sum of two different coherent states. The quantum properties of the obtained superpositions aim to significantly increase the applicability of optical Schrödinger cat states for quantum technology and quantum information processing.

quant-ph↗