Cat-state qubits formed by photonic cat states have a biased noise channel, i.e., one type of error dominates over all the others. We demonstrate that such biased-noise qubits are also promising for error-tolerant simulations of the quantum Rabi model (and its varieties) by coupling a cat-state qubit to an optical cavity. Using the cat-state qubit can effectively enhance the counterrotating coupling, allowing us to explore several fascinating quantum phenomena relying on the counterrotating interaction. Moreover, another benefit from biased-noise cat qubits is that the two main error channels (frequency and amplitude mismatches) are both exponentially suppressed. Therefore, the simulation protocols are robust against parameter errors of the parametric drive that determines the projection subspace. We analyze three examples: (i) collapse and revivals of quantum states; (ii) hidden symmetry and tunneling dynamics; and (iii) pair-cat-code computation.

Indistinguishability between photons is a key requirement for scalable photonic quantum technologies. We experimentally demonstrate that partly distinguishable single photons can be purified to reach near-unity indistinguishability by the process of quantum interference with ancillary photons followed by heralded detection of a subset of them. We report on the indistinguishability of the purified photons by interfering two purified photons and show improvements in the photon indistinguishability of 2.774(3)% in the low-noise regime, and as high as 10.2(5)% in the high-noise regime.

For decades, two main facets of underwater oil spills have been explored extensively—the rise of oil drops and resulting evolution of the oil slick at the air-water interface. We report on the bursting of rising oil drops at an air–liquid interface which precedes slick formation and reveal a counterintuitive bulge reversal that releases a daughter oil droplet inside the bulk as opposed to upward-shooting jets observed in bursting air bubbles. By unraveling the underlying physics we show that daughter droplet size and bulk liquid properties are correlated and their formation can be suppressed by an increase in the bulk viscosity.

The space-charge field of a relativistic charged bunch propagating in plasma is screened due to the presence of mobile charge carriers. We experimentally investigate such screening by measuring the effect of dielectric wakefields driven by the bunch in a uncoated dielectric capillary where the plasma is confined. We show that the plasma screens the space-charge field and therefore suppresses the dielectric wakefields when the distance between the bunch and the dielectric surface is much larger than the plasma skin depth. Before full screening is reached, the effects of dielectric and plasma wakefields are present simultaneously.

Ferroelectric hafnia-based thin films have attracted significant interest due to their compatibility with complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor technology (CMOS). Achieving and stabilizing the metastable ferroelectric phase in these films is crucial for their application in ferroelectric devices. Recent research efforts have concentrated on the stabilization of the ferroelectric phase in hafnia-based films and delving into the mechanisms responsible for this stability. In this study, we experimentally demonstrate that stabilization of the ferroelectric phase in ${\mathrm{Hf}}_{0.5}{\mathrm{Zr}}_{0.5}{\mathrm{O}}_2$ (HZO) can be controlled by the interfacial charge transfer and the associated hole doping of HZO. Using the meticulously engineered charge transfer between an ${\mathrm{La}}_{1-x}{\mathrm{Sr}}_x{\mathrm{MnO}}_3$ buffer layer with variable Sr concentration $x$ and an HZO film, we find the optimal $x=0.33$ that provides the required hole doping of HZO to most efficiently stabilize its ferroelectric phase. Our theoretical modeling reveals that the competition of the hole distribution between the threefold and fourfold coordinated oxygen sites in HZO controls the enhancement or reduction of the ferroelectric phase. Our findings offer a novel strategy to stabilize the ferroelectric phase of hafnia-based films and provide new insights into the development of ferroelectric devices compatible with CMOS.

An external periodic (Floquet) drive is believed to bring any initial state to the featureless infinite temperature state in generic nonintegrable isolated quantum many-body systems in the thermodynamic limit, irrespective of the driving frequency $\mathrm{\Omega }$. However, numerical or analytical evidence either proving or disproving this hypothesis is very limited and the issue has remained unsettled. Here, we study the initial state dependence of Floquet heating in a nonintegrable kicked Ising chain of length up to $L=30$ with an efficient quantum circuit simulator, showing a possible counterexample: the ground state of the effective Floquet Hamiltonian is exceptionally robust against heating, and could stay at finite energy density even after infinitely many Floquet cycles, if the driving period is shorter than a threshold value. This sharp energy localization transition or crossover does not happen for generic excited states. The exceptional robustness of the ground state is interpreted by (i) its isolation in the energy spectrum and (ii) the fact that those states with $L$-independent $\hslash \mathrm{\Omega }$ energy above the ground state energy of any generic local Hamiltonian, like the approximate Floquet Hamiltonian, are atypical and viewed as a collection of noninteracting quasiparticles. Our finding paves the way for engineering Floquet protocols with finite driving periods realizing long-lived, or possibly even perpetual, Floquet phases by initial state design.

We introduce twisted unitary $t$-groups, a generalization of unitary $t$-groups under a twisting by an irreducible representation. We then apply representation theoretic methods to the Knill-Laflamme error correction conditions to show that twisted unitary $t$-groups automatically correspond to quantum codes with distance $d=t+1$. By construction these codes have many transversal gates, which naturally do not spread errors and thus are useful for fault tolerance.

In this Letter, we construct a supersymmetric model, obtained by deforming $\mathcal{N}=2$ anti–de Sitter $\mathit{D}=3$ supergravity through a chiral vector component of the torsion. Moreover, we study the existence of supersymmetric states of such theory by inspecting the presence of Killing spinors on a specific bosonic solution.

We construct a kinetic model for matter-radiation interactions whose hydrodynamic gradient expansion can be computed analytically up to infinite order in derivatives, in the fully nonlinear regime, and for arbitrary flows. The frequency dependence of the opacity of matter is chosen to mimic the relaxation time of a self-interacting scalar field. In this way, the transient sector simulates that of a realistic quantum field theory. The gradient series is found to diverge for most flows, in agreement with previous findings. We identify, for the model at hand, the mechanism at the origin of the divergence, and we provide a successful regularization scheme. Additionally, we propose a universal qualitative framework for predicting the breakdown of the gradient expansion of an arbitrary microscopic system undergoing a given flow. This framework correctly recovers all previously known instances of gradient expansion divergence. As a new prediction, we show that the gradient expansion diverges when the energy-dependent mean free path is unbounded above.

We present the experimental realization of a continuous dynamical decoupling scheme which suppresses leading frequency shifts in a multi-ion frequency reference based on ${}^{40}{\mathrm{Ca}}^{+}$. By near-resonant magnetic coupling of the ${{}^2\mathrm{S}}_{1/2}$ and ${{}^2\mathrm{D}}_{5/2}$ Zeeman sublevels using radio-frequency dressing fields, engineered transitions with reduced sensitivity to magnetic-field fluctuations are obtained. A second stage detuned dressing field reduces the influence of amplitude noise in the first stage driving fields and decreases 2nd-rank tensor shifts, such as the electric quadrupole shift. Suppression of the quadratic dependence of the quadrupole shift to $3(2)\mathrm{mHz}/\mathrm{\mu }{\mathrm{m}}^2$ and coherence times of 290(20) ms on the optical transition are demonstrated even within a laboratory environment with significant magnetic field noise. Besides removing inhomogeneous line shifts in multi-ion clocks, the demonstrated dynamical decoupling technique may find applications in quantum computing and simulation with trapped ions by a tailored design of decoherence-free subspaces.

We investigate interfacial instability in a lifting Hele-Shaw cell by experiments and theory. We characterize the unexplored transition from stable to unstable patterns under a wide range of controlling parameters. Surprisingly, we find that the perturbation growth rate-based criterion for the onset of instability from linear stability theory is too strict by over 3 orders of magnitude. To reconcile this striking discrepancy, we propose a new criterion based on perturbation amplitude, which is in excellent agreement with the experimental results. We further show that the fingering pattern evolves to produce a hierarchical fluid structure and derive a theoretical equation to predict the fingering evolution.

We show that non-Abelian anyons can emerge from an Abelian topologically ordered system subject to local time-periodic driving. This is illustrated with the toric-code model, as the canonical representative of a broad class of Abelian topological spin liquids. The Abelian anyons in the toric code include fermionic and bosonic quasiparticle excitations which see each other as $\pi$ fluxes; namely, they result in the accumulation of a $\pi$ phase if wound around each other. Non-Abelian behavior emerges because the Floquet modulation can engineer a nontrivial band topology for the fermions, inducing their fractionalization into Floquet-Majorana modes bound to the bosons. The latter then develop non-Abelian character akin to vortices in topological superconductors, realizing Ising topological order. Our findings shed light on the nonequilibrium physics of driven topologically ordered quantum matter and may facilitate the observation of non-Abelian behavior in engineered quantum systems.

Electron spins confined in silicon quantum dots are promising candidates for large-scale quantum computers. However, the degeneracy of the conduction band of bulk silicon introduces additional levels dangerously close to the window of computational energies, where the quantum information can leak. The energy of the valley states—typically 0.1 meV—depends on hardly controllable atomistic disorder and still constitutes a fundamental limit to the scalability of these architectures. In this work, we introduce designs of complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor (CMOS)-compatible silicon fin field-effect transistors that enhance the energy gap to noncomputational states by more than one order of magnitude. Our devices comprise realistic silicon-germanium nanostructures with a large shear strain, where troublesome valley degrees of freedom are completely removed. The energy of noncomputational states is therefore not affected by unavoidable atomistic disorder and can further be tuned in situ by applied electric fields. Our design ideas are directly applicable to a variety of setups and will offer a blueprint toward silicon-based large-scale quantum processors.

An interesting problem in the field of quantum error correction involves finding a physical system that hosts a “passively protected quantum memory,” defined as an encoded qubit coupled to an environment that naturally wants to correct errors. To date, a quantum memory stable against finite-temperature effects is known only in four spatial dimensions or higher. Here, we take a different approach to realize a stable quantum memory by relying on a driven-dissipative environment. We propose a new model, the photonic-Ising model, which appears to passively correct against both bit-flip and phase-flip errors in two dimensions: a square lattice composed of photonic “cat qubits” coupled via dissipative terms which tend to fix errors locally. Inspired by the presence of two distinct ${\mathbb{Z}}_2$-symmetry-broken phases, our scheme relies on Ising-like dissipators to protect against bit flips and on a driven-dissipative photonic environment to protect against phase flips. We also discuss possible ways to realize the photonic-Ising model.

We present simulations of stochastic fluid dynamics in the vicinity of a critical endpoint belonging to the universality class of the Ising model. This study is motivated by the challenge of modeling the dynamics of critical fluctuations near a conjectured critical endpoint in the phase diagram of quantum chromodynamics (QCD). We focus on the interaction of shear modes with a conserved scalar density, which is known as model $H$. We show that the observed dynamical scaling behavior depends on the correlation length and the shear viscosity of the fluid. As the correlation length is increased or the viscosity is decreased we observe a crossover from the dynamical exponent of critical diffusion, $z\simeq 4$, to the expected scaling exponent of model $H$, $z\simeq 3$. We use our method to investigate the time-dependent correlation function of non-Gaussian moments $M^n(t)$ of the order parameter. We find that the relaxation time depends in a nontrivial manner on the power $n$.

Nuclear hyperfine mixing (NHM) is a distinctive effect through which nuclear properties and dynamics can be efficiently controlled. Traditionally, the scientific consensus has predominantly associated NHM with its pronounced impact on ${}^{229}\mathrm{Th}$, owing to the existence of its low-lying isomeric state. However, in the present study, by developing a general theory for NHM, we predict a surprisingly substantial NHM effect in boronlike ${}^{205}\mathrm{Pb}$ ions (specifically, ${{}^{205}\mathrm{Pb}}^{77+}$), featuring a nuclear transition energy of 2.329 keV. The radiative lifetime of the ${}^{205}\mathrm{Pb}$ isomer is reduced by 4 orders of magnitude, from 15 min to 32 ms. This remarkable and unexpected NHM effect stems from a heretofore unexplored process: an opening of a magnetic dipole channel that is otherwise forbidden without NHM. ${}^{205}\mathrm{Pb}$ ions now emerge as an attractive alternative candidate for experimental validation and investigation of the NHM effect.

Excess “micromotion” of trapped ions due to the residual radio-frequency (rf) trapping field at their location is often undesirable and is usually carefully minimized. Here, we induce precise amounts of excess micromotion on individual ions by adjusting the local static electric field they experience. Micromotion modulates the coupling of an ion to laser fields, ideally tuning it from its maximum value to zero as the ion is moved away from the trap’s rf null. We use tunable micromotion to vary the Rabi frequency of stimulated Raman transitions over two orders of magnitude, and to individually control the rates of resonant fluorescence from three ions under global laser illumination without any changes to the driving light fields. The technique is amenable to situations where addressing individual ions with focused laser beams is challenging, such as tightly packed linear ion strings or two-dimensional ion arrays illuminated from the side.