We study the driven Brownian motion of hard rods in a one-dimensional cosine potential with a large amplitude compared to the thermal energy. In a closed system, we find surprising features of the steady-state current in dependence of the particle density. The form of the current-density relation changes greatly with the particle size and can exhibit both a local maximum and minimum. The changes are caused by an interplay of a barrier reduction, blocking, and exchange symmetry effect. The latter leads to a current equal to that of noninteracting particles for a particle size commensurate with the period length of the cosine potential. For an open system coupled to particle reservoirs, we predict five different phases of nonequilibrium steady states to occur. Our results show that the particle size can be of crucial importance for nonequilibrium phase transitions in driven systems. Possible experiments for demonstrating our findings are pointed out.

We report the experimental realization of a cross-linked chiral ladder with ultracold fermionic atoms in a 1D optical lattice. In the ladder, the legs are formed by the orbital states of the optical lattice and the complex interleg links are generated by the orbital-changing Raman transitions that are driven by a moving lattice potential superimposed onto the optical lattice. The effective magnetic flux per ladder plaquette is tuned by the spatial periodicity of the moving lattice, and the chiral currents are observed from the asymmetric momentum distributions of the orbitals. The effect of the complex cross-links is demonstrated in quench dynamics by measuring the momentum dependence of the interorbital coupling strength. We discuss the topological phase transition of the chiral ladder system for the variations of the complex cross-links.

Operationally accessible entanglement in bipartite systems of indistinguishable particles could be reduced due to restrictions on the allowed local operations as a result of particle number conservation. In order to quantify this effect, Wiseman and Vaccaro [Phys. Rev. Lett. 91, 097902 (2003)] introduced an operational measure of the von Neumann entanglement entropy. Motivated by advances in measuring Rényi entropies in quantum many-body systems subject to conservation laws, we derive a generalization of the operationally accessible entanglement that is both computationally and experimentally measurable. Using the Widom theorem, we investigate its scaling with the size of a spatial subregion for free fermions and find a logarithmically violated area law scaling, similar to the spatial entanglement entropy, with at most a double-log leading-order correction. A modification of the correlation matrix method confirms our findings in systems of up to $10^5$ particles.

Secret sharing is a conventional technique for realizing secure communications in information networks, where a dealer distributes to $n$ players a secret, which can only be decoded through the cooperation of $k$ ($n/2<k\le n$) players. In recent years, quantum resources have been employed to enhance security of secret sharing, which has been named quantum secret sharing (QSS). A multipartite bound entanglement (BE) state of an optical field, due to its special entanglement features, can be used in quantum networks to improve security and flexibility of communication. We design and experimentally demonstrate a QSS protocol, where the dealer modulates a secret on a four-partite BE state and then distributes the submodes of the BE state to four spatially separated players. The presented QSS scheme has the capability to protect secrets from eavesdropping and dishonest players, because a nonlocal and deterministic BE state is shared among four authorized players.

Entanglement not only plays a crucial role in quantum technologies, but is key to our understanding of quantum correlations in many-body systems. However, in an experiment, the only way of measuring entanglement in a generic mixed state is through reconstructive quantum tomography, requiring an exponential number of measurements in the system size. Here, we propose a machine-learning-assisted scheme to measure the entanglement between arbitrary subsystems of size $N_A$ and $N_B$, with $\mathcal{O}(N_A+N_B)$ measurements, and without any prior knowledge of the state. The method exploits a neural network to learn the unknown, nonlinear function relating certain measurable moments and the logarithmic negativity. Our procedure will allow entanglement measurements in a wide variety of systems, including strongly interacting many-body systems in both equilibrium and nonequilibrium regimes.

Quantum resources can improve communication complexity problems (CCPs) beyond their classical constraints. One quantum approach is to share entanglement and create correlations violating a Bell inequality, which can then assist classical communication. A second approach is to resort solely to the preparation, transmission, and measurement of a single quantum system, in other words, quantum communication. Here, we show the advantages of the latter over the former in high-dimensional Hilbert space. We focus on a family of CCPs, based on facet Bell inequalities, study the advantage of high-dimensional quantum communication, and realize such quantum communication strategies using up to ten-dimensional systems. The experiment demonstrates, for growing dimension, an increasing advantage over quantum strategies based on Bell inequality violation. For sufficiently high dimensions, quantum communication also surpasses the limitations of the postquantum Bell correlations obeying only locality in the macroscopic limit. We find that the advantages are tied to the use of measurements that are not rank-one projective, and provide an experimental semi-device-independent falsification of such measurements in Hilbert space dimension six.

We compute the persistence for the $2D$-diffusion equation with random initial condition, i.e., the probability $p_0(t)$ that the diffusion field, at a given point $\mathbf{x}$ in the plane, has not changed sign up to time $t$. For large $t$, we show that $p_0(t)\sim t^{-\theta (2)}$ with $\theta (2)=3/16$. Using the connection between the $2D$-diffusion equation and Kac random polynomials, we show that the probability $q_0(n)$ that Kac’s polynomials, of (even) degree $n$, have no real root decays, for large $n$, as $q_0(n)\sim n^{-3/4}$. We obtain this result by using yet another connection with the truncated orthogonal ensemble of random matrices. This allows us to compute various properties of the zero crossings of the diffusing field, equivalently of the real roots of Kac’s polynomials. Finally, we unveil a precise connection with a fourth model: the semi-infinite Ising spin chain with Glauber dynamics at zero temperature.

We report the realization of a robust and highly controllable two-dimensional (2D) spin-orbit (SO) coupling with a topological nontrivial band structure. By applying a retro-reflected 2D optical lattice, phase tunable Raman couplings are formed into the antisymmetric Raman lattice structure, and generate the 2D SO coupling with precise inversion and $C_4$ symmetries, leading to considerably enlarged topological regions. The lifetime of the 2D SO coupled Bose-Einstein condensate reaches several seconds, which enables exploring fine-tuning interaction effects. These essential advantages of the present new realization open the door to explore exotic quantum many-body effects and nonequilibrium dynamics with novel topology.

We present a violation of the Clauser-Horne-Shimony-Holt inequality without the fair sampling assumption with a continuously pumped photon pair source combined with two high efficiency superconducting detectors. Because of the continuous nature of the source, the choice of the duration of each measurement round effectively controls the average number of photon pairs participating in the Bell test. We observe a maximum violation of $S=2.01602(32)$ with an average number of pairs per round of $\approx 0.32$, compatible with our system overall detection efficiencies. Systems that violate a Bell inequality are guaranteed to generate private randomness, with the randomness extraction rate depending on the observed violation and on the repetition rate of the Bell test. For our realization, the optimal rate of randomness generation is a compromise between the observed violation and the duration of each measurement round, with the latter realistically limited by the detection time jitter. Using an extractor composably secure against quantum adversary with quantum side information, we calculate an asymptotic rate of $\approx 1300\mathrm{random}\mathrm{bits}/\mathrm{s}$. With an experimental run of 43 min, we generated 617 920 random bits, corresponding to $\approx 240\mathrm{random}\mathrm{bits}/\mathrm{s}$.

We study $S=1$ quantum spin systems on the infinite chain with short ranged Hamiltonians that have a certain rotational and discrete symmetry. We define a ${\mathbb{Z}}_2$ index for any gapped unique ground state, and prove that it is invariant under a smooth deformation. By using the index, we provide the first rigorous proof of the existence of a “topological” phase transition, which cannot be characterized by any conventional order parameters, between the Affleck-Kennedy-Lieb-Tasaki (AKLT) model and trivial models. This rigorously establishes that the AKLT model is in a nontrivial symmetry protected topological phase.

We address the problem of the minus sign sampling for two-electron systems using the path integral approach. We show that this problem can be reexpressed as one of computing free energy differences and sampling the tails of statistical distributions. Using metadynamics, a realistic problem like that of two electrons confined in a quantum dot can be solved. We believe that this is a strategy that can possibly be extended to more complex systems.

The emergence of nonequilibrium phenomena in individual complex wave systems has long been of fundamental interest. Its analytic studies remain notoriously difficult. Using the mathematical tool of the concentration of measure, we develop a theory for structures and fluctuations of waves in individual disordered media. We find that, for both diffusive and localized waves, fluctuations associated with the change in incoming waves (“wave-to-wave” fluctuations) exhibit a new kind of universality, which does not exist in conventional mesoscopic fluctuations associated with the change in disorder realizations (“sample-to-sample” fluctuations), and originates from the coherence between the natural channels of waves—the transmission eigenchannels. Using the results obtained for wave-to-wave fluctuations, we find the criterion for almost all stationary scattering states to exhibit the same spatial structure such as the diffusive steady state. We further show that the expectations of observables at stationary scattering states are independent of incoming waves and are given by their averages with respect to eigenchannels. This suggests the possibility of extending the studies of thermalization of closed systems to open systems, which provides new perspectives for the emergence of nonequilibrium statistical phenomena.

We propose a multiscale diagonalization scheme to study disordered one-dimensional chains, in particular, the transition between many-body localization (MBL) and the ergodic phase, expected to be governed by resonant spots. Our scheme focuses on the dichotomy of MBL versus validity of the eigenstate thermalization hypothesis. We show that a few natural assumptions imply that the system is localized with probability one at criticality. On the ergodic side, delocalization is induced by a quantum avalanche seeded by large ergodic spots, whose size diverges at the transition. On the MBL side, the typical localization length tends to the inverse of the maximal entropy density at the transition, but there is a divergent length scale related to the response to an inclusion of large ergodic spots. A mean-field approximation analytically illustrates these results and predicts a power-law distribution for thermal inclusions at criticality.

Quantum teleportation establishes a correspondence between an entangled state shared by two separate parties that can communicate classically and the presence of a quantum channel connecting the two parties. The standard benchmark for quantum teleportation, based on the average fidelity between the input and output states, indicates that some entangled states do not lead to channels which can be certified to be quantum. It was recently shown that if one considers a finer-grained witness, then all entangled states can be certified to produce a nonclassical teleportation channel. Here we experimentally demonstrate a complete characterization of a new family of such witnesses, of the type proposed in Phys. Rev. Lett. 119, 110501 (2017) under different conditions of noise. We report nonclassical teleportation using quantum states that cannot achieve average fidelity of teleportation above the classical limit. We further use the violation of these witnesses to estimate the negativity of the shared state. Our results have fundamental implications in quantum information protocols and may also lead to new applications and quality certification of quantum technologies.

We demonstrate that a summing up series of Feynman diagrams can yield unbiased accurate results for strongly correlated fermions even when the convergence radius vanishes. We consider the unitary Fermi gas, a model of nonrelativistic fermions in three-dimensional continuous space. Diagrams are built from partially dressed or fully dressed propagators of single particles and pairs. The series is resummed by a conformal-Borel transformation that incorporates the large-order behavior and the analytic structure in the Borel plane, which are found by the instanton approach. We report highly accurate numerical results for the equation of state in the normal unpolarized regime, and reconcile experimental data with the theoretically conjectured fourth virial coefficient.

A key quantity in strongly interacting resonant Fermi gases is the contact $\mathcal{C}$, which characterizes numerous properties such as the momentum distribution at large momenta or the pair correlation function at short distances. The temperature dependence of $\mathcal{C}$ was measured at unitarity, where existing theoretical predictions differ substantially even at the qualitative level. We report accurate data for the contact and the momentum distribution of the unitary gas in the normal phase, obtained by bold diagrammatic Monte Carlo and Borel resummation. Our results agree with experimental data within error bars and provide crucial benchmarks for the development of advanced theoretical treatments and precision measurements.

We identify precision limits for the simultaneous estimation of multiple parameters in multimode interferometers. Quantum strategies to enhance the multiparameter sensitivity are based on entanglement among particles, modes, or combining both. The maximum attainable sensitivity of particle-separable states defines the multiparameter shot-noise limit, which can be surpassed without mode entanglement. Further enhancements up to the multiparameter Heisenberg limit are possible by adding mode entanglement. Optimal strategies that saturate the precision bounds are provided.

The spin-coherent-state positive-operator-valued-measure (POVM) is a fundamental measurement in quantum science, with applications including tomography, metrology, teleportation, benchmarking, and measurement of Husimi phase space probabilities. We prove that this POVM is achieved by collectively measuring the spin projection of an ensemble of qubits weakly and isotropically. We apply this in the context of optimal tomography of pure qubits. We show numerically that through a sequence of weak measurements of random directions of the collective spin component, sampled discretely or in a continuous measurement with random controls, one can approach the optimal bound.

Interaction among harmonic oscillators described by a trilinear Hamiltonian $\hslash \xi (a^{†}bc+a{b}^{†}{c}^{†})$ is one of the most fundamental models in quantum optics. By employing the anharmonicity of the Coulomb potential in a linear trapped three-ion crystal, we experimentally implement it among three normal modes of motion in the strong-coupling regime, where the coupling strength is much larger than the decoherence rate of the ion motion. We use it to simulate the interaction of an atom and light as described by the Tavis-Cummings model and the process of nondegenerate parametric down-conversion in the regime of a depleted pump.

We experimentally and numerically investigate the sudden expansion of fermions in a homogeneous one-dimensional optical lattice. For initial states with an appreciable amount of doublons, we observe a dynamical phase separation between rapidly expanding singlons and slow doublons remaining in the trap center, realizing the key aspect of fermionic quantum distillation in the strongly interacting limit. For initial states without doublons, we find a reduced interaction dependence of the asymptotic expansion speed compared to bosons, which is explained by the interaction energy produced in the quench.