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arXiv:0707.4435 · Physical Review A

Emulating non-Abelian topological matter in cold-atom optical lattices

V. W. Scarola, S. Das Sarma

Published Feb 11, 2008• 3 citations
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Abstract

Certain proposed extended Bose-Hubbard models may exhibit topologically ordered ground states with excitations obeying non-Abelian braid statistics. A sufficient tuning of Hubbard parameters could yield excitation braiding rules allowing implementation of a universal set of topologically protected quantum gates. We discuss potential difficulties in realizing a model with a proposed non-Abelian topologically ordered ground state using optical lattices containing bosonic dipoles. Our direct implementation scheme does not realize the necessary anisotropic hopping, anisotropic interactions, and low temperatures.

DOI
10.1103/physreva.77.023612

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Certain proposed extended Bose-Hubbard models may exhibit topologically ordered ground states with excitations obeying non-Abelian braid statistics. A sufficient tuning of Hubbard parameters could yield excitation braiding rules allowing implementation of a universal set of topologically protected quantum gates. We discuss potential difficulties in realizing a model with a proposed non-Abelian topologically ordered ground state using optical lattices containing bosonic dipoles. Our direct implementation scheme does not realize the necessary anisotropic hopping, anisotropic interactions, and low temperatures.
Topological quantum states of matter, both Abelian and non-Abelian, are characterized by excitations whose wavefunctions undergo nontrivial statistical transformations as one excitation is moved (braided) around another. Topological quantum computation proposes to use the topological protection and the braiding statistics of a non-Abelian topological state to perform quantum computation. The enormous technological prospect of topological quantum computation provides new motivation for experimentally observing a topological state. Here, we explicitly work out a realistic experimental scheme to create and braid the Abelian topological excitations in the Kitaev model built on a tunable robust system, a cold atom optical lattice. We also demonstrate how to detect the key feature of these excitations: their braiding statistics. Observation of this statistics would directly establish the existence of anyons, quantum particles that are neither fermions nor bosons. In addition to establishing topological matter, the experimental scheme we develop here can also be adapted to a non-Abelian topological state, supported by the same Kitaev model but in a different parameter regime, to eventually build topologically protected quantum gates.
We present a scheme to implement a Fermi-Hubbard-like model in ultracold atoms in optical lattices and analyze the topological features of its ground state. In particular, we show that the ground state for appropriate parameters has a large overlap with a lattice version of the bosonic Laughlin state at filling factor one-half. The scheme utilizes laser assisted and normal tunneling in a checkerboard optical lattice. The requirements on temperature, interactions, and hopping strengths are similar to those needed to observe the N\'eel antiferromagnetic ordering in the standard Fermi-Hubbard model in the Mott insulating regime.
Exactly solvable models of topologically ordered phases with non-abelian anyons typically require complicated many-body interactions which do not naturally appear in nature. This motivates the "inverse problem" of quantum many-body physics: given microscopic systems with experimentally realistic two-body interactions, how to design a Hamiltonian that realizes a desired topological phase? Here we solve this problem on a platform motivated by Rydberg atoms, where elementary two-level systems couple via simple blockade interactions. Within this framework, we construct Hamiltonians that realize topological orders described by non-abelian quantum double models. We analytically prove the existence of topological order in the ground state, and present efficient schemes to prepare these states. We also introduce protocols for the controlled adiabatic braiding of anyonic excitations to probe their non-abelian statistics. Our construction is generic and applies to quantum doubles D(G)\mathcal{D}(G)D(G) for arbitrary finite groups GGG. We illustrate braiding for the simplest non-abelian quantum double D(S3)\mathcal{D}(S_3)D(S3​).
The realization of non-Abelian anyons in topological phases is a crucial step toward topological quantum computation. We propose a scheme to realize a non-Abelian quantum spin liquid (QSL) phase in a three-component Bose gas with contact interaction on optical kagome lattices. In the strong coupling regime, the system is described by an effective spin-1 model with two- and three-body interactions between neighboring spins. By mapping out the phase diagram via the variational Monte Carlo method, we find a non-Abelian chiral spin-liquid phase in which the Ising-type anyons obey non-Abelian braiding statistics. The gapless chiral edge states can be detected by measuring the spin-spin correlation from atomic population. Furthermore, an interesting Z2{Z}_{2}Z2​ QSL phase is observed exhibiting both topological order and lattice symmetry-breaking order. Our scheme can be implemented in cold quantum gases of bosonic atoms.
This thesis is a contribution to the research field of quantum simulations of topological phases of matter, i.e. quantum states characterized by a non-local order parameter.The aim of the research on quantum simulations is to overcome the difficulties encountered in the study of quantum mechanical models with conventional numerical methods.The proposed way to accomplish this task is the direct exploitation of controllable quantum systems whose properties, for instance low-energy physics, mimic those of the model to be studied.We study several problems connected to the objective of creating a quantum simulator of topological phases of matter.In particular, we discuss how to engineer the Hamiltonian of topological models, how to measure quantities which unravel topological orders, and how to quantify the reliability of topological quantum memories.The first direction of investigation considered in this thesis regards the development of new techniques to simulate topological states of matter with cold atoms in optical lattices.We propose a scheme based on an unconventional use of a bi-chromatic optical lattice to engineer the Hamiltonians of several topological insulators and of the related non-interacting relativistic models.We also focus on the Pfaffian wavefunction, a topological state supporting non-Abelian quasi-excitations arising in the presence of three-body interactions.We present a proposal for the realization with optical lattices of systems characterized by such interactions and discuss the possibility of using such a scheme to create a topological state, such as the mentioned wavefunction.The second line of research considered in this thesis concerns the detection of a string operator in optical lattices.We report on an experiment, to which we provided theoretical support, aimed at the measurement of the non-local order parameter of a one-dimensional Mott insulator; we support the discussion with the relevant theoretical background.Although the Mott insulator is not a topological phase, the measurement of string observables is crucial to reveal the non-local order of several topological states, and the developed experimental protocol is expected to be relevant in future experiments.The third contribution of this thesis is related to the use of topological phases to build a quantum computer, which is a specific example of a quantum simulator.We focus on the important problem of understanding whether it is possible to reliably store quantum information in topological states.We consider one specific class of topological quantum memories, namely those based on a fermionic topological superconductor with zero-energy Majorana modes.At the end of the storage period, we take into account the possibility of applying an operation aimed at the recovery of the information initially encoded into the system and then diminished by the time evolution.In particular, we vii