Many disordered systems show a superdiffusive dynamics, intermediate between the diffusive one, typical of a classical stochastic process, and the so-called ballistic behavior, which is generally expected for the spreading in a quantum process. We have experimentally investigated the superdiffusive behavior of a quantum walk, whose dynamics can be related to energy transport phenomena, with a resolution which is high enough to clearly distinguish between different disorder regimes. By our experimental setup, the region between ballistic and diffusive spreading can be effectively scanned by suitably setting few degrees of freedom and without applying any decoherence to the quantum walk evolution.

We study a driven, spin-orbit coupled fermionic system in a lattice at the resonant regime where the drive frequency equals the Hubbard repulsion, for which nontrivial constrained dynamics emerge at fast timescales. An effective density-dependent tunneling model is derived, and it is examined in the sparse filling regime in one dimension. The system exhibits entropic self-localization, where while even numbers of atoms propagate ballistically, odd numbers form localized bound states induced by an effective attraction from a higher configurational entropy. These phenomena occur in the strong coupling limit where interactions impose only a constraint with no explicit Hamiltonian term. We show how the constrained dynamics lead to quantum few-body scars and map to an Anderson impurity model with an additional intriguing feature of nonreciprocal scattering. Connections to many-body scars and localization are also discussed.

We introduce a quantum Monte Carlo inspired reweighting scheme to accurately compute energies from optimally short quantum circuits. This effectively hybrid quantum-classical approach features both entanglement provided by a short quantum circuit, and the presence of an effective nonunitary operator at the same time. The functional form of this projector is borrowed from classical computation and is able to filter out high-energy components generated by a suboptimal variational quantum heuristic Ansatz. The accuracy of this approach is demonstrated numerically in finding energies of entangled ground states of many-body lattice models. We demonstrate a practical implementation on IBM quantum hardware up to an 8-qubit circuit.

We provide a new hydrodynamic framework to describe out-of-equilibrium integrable systems with space-time inhomogeneous interactions. Our result builds up on the recently introduced generalized hydrodynamics (GHD). The method allows us to analytically describe the dynamics during generic space-time-dependent smooth modulations of the interactions. As a proof of concept, we study experimentally motivated interaction quenches in the trapped interacting Bose gas, which cannot be treated with current analytical or numerical methods. We also benchmark our results in the $XXZ$ spin chain and in the classical sinh-Gordon model.

The Kibble-Zurek mechanism predicts the formation of topological defects and other excitations that quantify how much a quantum system driven across a quantum critical point fails to be adiabatic. We point out that, thanks to the divergent linear susceptibility at the critical point, even a tiny symmetry breaking bias can restore the adiabaticity. The minimal required bias scales like ${\tau }_Q^{-\beta \delta /(1+z\nu )}$, where $\beta$, $\delta$, $z$, $\nu$ are the critical exponents and ${\tau }_Q$ is a quench time. We test this prediction by DMRG simulations of the quantum Ising chain. It is directly applicable to the recent emulation of quantum phase transition dynamics in the Ising chain with ultracold Rydberg atoms.

An integrable model subjected to a periodic driving gives rise generally to a nonintegrable Floquet Hamiltonian. Here we show that the Floquet Hamiltonian of the integrable Lieb-Liniger model in the presence of a linear potential with a periodic time-dependent strength is instead integrable and its quasienergies can be determined using the Bethe ansatz approach. We discuss various aspects of the dynamics of the system at stroboscopic times and we also propose a possible experimental realization of the periodically driven tilting in terms of a shaken rotated ring potential.

Evidence for Bell’s nonlocality is so far mainly restricted to microscopic systems, where the elements of reality that are negated predetermine results of measurements to within one spin unit. Any observed nonlocal effect (or lack of classical predetermination) is then limited to no more than the difference of a single photon or electron being detected or not (at a given detector). In this paper, we analyze experiments that report the Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen (EPR) steering form of nonlocality for mesoscopic photonic or Bose-Einstein condensate systems. Using an EPR steering parameter, we show how the EPR nonlocalities involved can be quantified for four-mode states, to give evidence of EPR-nonlocal effects corresponding to a two-mode number difference of $10^5$ photons, or of several tens of atoms (at a given site). Applying to experiments, we also show how the variance criterion of Duan, Giedke, Cirac and Zoller for EPR entanglement can be used to determine a lower bound on the number of particles in a pure two-mode EPR-entangled or steerable state.

If an open quantum system is periodically driven with high frequency and the driving commutes with the system-bath coupling operator, it is known that the system approaches a Floquet-Gibbs state, a generalization of Gibbs states to periodically driven systems. Here, we investigate the stationary state of an ac-driven system when the driving and dissipation are noncommutative. Then, the resulting stationary state does not obey the Floquet-Gibbs distribution, and the system dynamics is determined by inelastic scattering processes of the driving field. Based on the Floquet-Redfield formalism, we show that the probability distribution can exhibit population inversion and discontinuities, i.e., jumps, for parameters at which coherent destruction of tunneling takes place. These discontinuities can be observed as intensity jumps in the emission into the bath.

Quantum annealing aims at solving hard computational problems through adiabatic state preparation. Here, I propose to use inhomogeneous longitudinal magnetic fields to enhance the efficiency of the annealing. Such fields are able to bias the annealing dynamics into the desired solution, and in many cases, suitable field configurations can be found iteratively. Alternatively, the longitudinal fields can also be applied as an antibias which filters out unwanted contributions from the final state. This strategy is particularly well suited for instances which are difficult to solve within the standard quantum annealing approach. By numerically simulating the dynamics for small instances of the exact cover problem, the performance of these different strategies is investigated.

Conditional-phase (cz) gates in transmons can be realized by flux pulsing computational states towards resonance with noncomputational ones. We present a 40 ns cz gate based on a bipolar flux pulse suppressing leakage (0.1%) by interference and approaching the speed limit set by exchange coupling. This pulse harnesses a built-in echo to enhance fidelity (99.1%) and is robust to long-timescale distortion in the flux-control line, ensuring repeatability. Numerical simulations matching experiment show that fidelity is limited by high-frequency dephasing and leakage by short-timescale distortion.

We report on an experimental study of the Lipkin-Meshkov-Glick model of quantum spins interacting at infinite range in a transverse magnetic field, which exhibits a ferromagnetic phase transition in the thermodynamic limit. We use dysprosium atoms of electronic spin $J=8$, subjected to a quadratic Zeeman light shift, to simulate $2J=16$ interacting spins $1/2$. We probe the system microscopically using single magnetic sublevel resolution, giving access to the spin projection parity, which is the collective observable characterizing the underlying ${\mathbb{Z}}_2$ symmetry. We measure the thermodynamic properties and dynamical response of the system, and we study the quantum critical behavior around the transition point. In the ferromagnetic phase, we achieve coherent tunneling between symmetry-broken states, and we test the link between symmetry breaking and the appearance of a finite order parameter.

An atom moving in a vacuum at constant velocity and parallel to a surface experiences a frictional force induced by the dissipative interaction with the quantum fluctuations of the electromagnetic field. We show that the combination of nonequilibrium dynamics, the anomalous Doppler effect, and spin-momentum locking of light mediates an intriguing interplay between the atom’s translational and rotational motion. In turn, this deeply affects the drag force in a way that is reminiscent of classical rolling friction. Our fully non-Markovian and nonequilibrium description reveals counterintuitive features characterizing the atom’s velocity-dependent rotational dynamics. These results prompt interesting directions for tuning the interaction and for investigating nonequilibrium dynamics as well as the properties of confined light.

Robust qubit memory is essential for quantum computing, both for near-term devices operating without error correction, and for the long-term goal of a fault-tolerant processor. We directly measure the memory error ${\epsilon }_m$ for a ${}^{43}{\mathrm{Ca}}^{+}$ trapped-ion qubit in the small-error regime and find ${\epsilon }_m<{10}^{-4}$ for storage times $t\lesssim 50\mathrm{ms}$. This exceeds gate or measurement times by three orders of magnitude. Using randomized benchmarking, at $t=1\mathrm{ms}$ we measure ${\epsilon }_m=1.2(7)\times {10}^{-6}$, around ten times smaller than that extrapolated from the $T_2^{*}$ time, and limited by instability of the atomic clock reference used to benchmark the qubit.

We establish that entropy production, which is crucial to the characterization of thermodynamic irreversibility, is obtained through a variational principle involving the Kulback-Leibler divergence. A simple application of this representation leads to an information-theoretical bound on entropy production in thermal relaxation processes; this is a stronger inequality than the conventional second law of thermodynamics. This bound is also interpreted as a constraint on the possible path of a thermal relaxation process in terms of information geometry. Our results reveal a hidden universal law inherent to general thermal relaxation processes.

By example of the nonlinear Kerr mode driven by a laser, we show that hysteresis phenomena in systems featuring a driven-dissipative phase transition can be accurately described in terms of just two collective, dissipative Liouvillian eigenmodes. The key quantities are just two components of a non-Abelian geometric connection, even though a single parameter is driven. This powerful geometric approach considerably simplifies the description of driven-dissipative phase transitions, extending the range of computationally accessible parameter regimes, and providing a new starting point for both experimental studies and analytical insights.

Quantum coherence is a fundamental feature of quantum mechanics and an underlying requirement for most quantum information tasks. In the resource theory of coherence, incoherent states are diagonal with respect to a fixed orthonormal basis; i.e., they can be seen as arising from a von Neumann measurement. Here, we introduce and study a generalization to a resource theory of coherence defined with respect to the most general quantum measurements, i.e., to arbitrary positive-operator-valued measures (POVMs). We establish POVM-based coherence measures and POVM-incoherent operations that coincide for the case of von Neumann measurements with their counterparts in standard coherence theory. We provide a semidefinite program that allows us to characterize interconversion properties of resource states and exemplify our framework by means of the qubit trine POVM, for which we also show analytical results.

The fluctuation theorem is the fundamental equality in nonequilibrium thermodynamics that is used to derive many important thermodynamic relations, such as the second law of thermodynamics and the Jarzynski equality. Recently, the thermodynamic uncertainty relation was discovered, which states that the fluctuation of observables is lower bounded by the entropy production. In the present Letter, we derive a thermodynamic uncertainty relation from the fluctuation theorem. We refer to the obtained relation as the fluctuation theorem uncertainty relation, and it is valid for arbitrary dynamics, stochastic as well as deterministic, and for arbitrary antisymmetric observables for which a fluctuation theorem holds. We apply the fluctuation theorem uncertainty relation to an overdamped Langevin dynamics for an antisymmetric observable. We demonstrate that the antisymmetric observable satisfies the fluctuation theorem uncertainty relation but does not satisfy the relation reported for current-type observables in continuous-time Markov chains. Moreover, we show that the fluctuation theorem uncertainty relation can handle systems controlled by time-symmetric external protocols, in which the lower bound is given by the work exerted on the systems.

Quantum metrology concerns estimating a parameter from multiple identical uses of a quantum channel. We extend quantum metrology beyond this standard setting and consider the estimation of a physical process with quantum memory, here referred to as a parametrized quantum comb. We present a theoretic framework of metrology of quantum combs, and derive a general upper bound of the comb quantum Fisher information. The bound can be operationally interpreted as the quantum Fisher information of a memoryless quantum channel times a dimensional factor. We then show an example where the bound can be attained up to a factor of 4. With the example and the bound, we show that memory in quantum sensors plays an even more crucial role in the estimation of combs than in the standard setting of quantum metrology.