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arXiv:0710.5804

Experimental Demonstration of the Unified Framework for the Mixed State Geometric Phase

Jiangfeng Du, Mingjun Shi, Jing Zhu, Vlatko Vedral, Xinhua Peng, Dieter Suter

Published Oct 31, 2007• 0 citations
arXivHTMLPDF

Abstract

Geometrical phases have been applied in virtually every major branch of physics and they play an important role in topology and knot theory in mathematics and quantum computation. However, most of the early works focus on pure quantum states which are very unrealistic and almost never occur in practice. The two existed definitions -Uhlmann's and Sjöqvist's- would result in different values for the geometric phase in general. The definition of geometric phase in mixed state scenario is still an open question. Here we present a unified framework for both approaches within one and the same formalism based on simple interferometry. We then present experimental results which confirm both approaches to mixed state geometric phase and clearly demonstrate that their unification is possible. Our experiments are furthermore the first such to measure Uhlmann's mixed state geometric phase and show in addition that it is different to the Sjöqvist's phase.

DOI
10.48550/arxiv.0710.5804

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We find for the unitary evolution of spin-1/2 systems that the "purely mathematical mixed state holonomy of Uhlmann limitedly agrees, in the case of evolution over geodesic spherical triangles, with the holonomy "in the experimental context of quantum interferometry" recently proposed by Sjoqvist, Pati, Ekert, Anandan, Ericsson, Oi and Vedral (Phys. Rev. Lett. 85 [2000], 2845-2848).

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Geometrical phases have been applied in virtually every major branch of physics and they play an important role in topology and knot theory in mathematics and quantum computation. However, most of the early works focus on pure quantum states which are very unrealistic and almost never occur in practice. The two existed definitions -Uhlmann's and Sjöqvist's- would result in different values for the geometric phase in general. The definition of geometric phase in mixed state scenario is still an open question. Here we present a unified framework for both approaches within one and the same formalism based on simple interferometry. We then present experimental results which confirm both approaches to mixed state geometric phase and clearly demonstrate that their unification is possible. Our experiments are furthermore the first such to measure Uhlmann's mixed state geometric phase and show in addition that it is different to the Sjöqvist's phase.
Pure-state manifestations of geometric phase are well established and have found applications across essentially all branches of physics, yet their generalization to mixed-state regimes remains largely unexplored experimentally. The Uhlmann geometric phase offers a natural extension of pure-state paradigms and can exhibit a topological character. However, observation of this invariant is impeded by the incompatibility between Uhlmann parallel transport and Hamiltonian dynamics, as well as the difficulty of preparing topologically nontrivial mixed states. To address this challenge, we report an experimentally accessible protocol for directly measuring the mixed-state topological invariant. By engineering controlled nonunitary dynamics in a photonic quantum walk, we prepare topologically nontrivial mixed states from a trivial initial state. Furthermore, by machine-learning the full density matrix in momentum space, we directly extract the quantized geometric phase of the nontrivial mixed states. These results highlight a geometric phase framework that naturally extends to open quantum systems both in and out of thermal equilibrium.
Two geometric phases of mixed quantum states, known as the interferometric phase and Uhlmann phase, are generalizations of the Berry phase of pure states. After reviewing the two geometric phases and examining their parallel-transport conditions, we specify a class of cyclic processes that are compatible with both conditions and therefore accumulate both phases through their definitions, respectively. Those processes then facilitate a fair comparison between the two phases. We present exact solutions of two-level and three-level systems to contrast the two phases. While the interferometric phase exhibits finite-temperature transitions only in the three-level system but not the two-level system, the Uhlmann phase shows finite-temperature transitions in both cases. Thus, using the two geometric phases as finite-temperature topological indicators demonstrates the rich physics of topology of mixed states.
Examples of geometric phases abound in many areas of physics. They offer both fundamental insights into many physical phenomena and lead to interesting practical implementations. One of them, as indicated recently, might be an inherently fault-tolerant quantum computation. This, however, requires one to deal with geometric phases in the presence of noise and interactions between different physical subsystems. Despite the wealth of literature on the subject of geometric phases very little is known about this very important case. Here we report the first experimental study of geometric phases for mixed quantum states. We show how different they are from the well-understood, noiseless, pure-state case.
Note that equations and expressions has been omitted here and is instead presented in the work. This thesis focuses on the geometric phase in pure and mixed quantum states. For the case of a pure quantum state, Berry's adiabatic approach (4.1.10) and Aharonov & Anandan's non-adiabatic generalization of Berry's approach (4.2.8) are included in this work. Mixed quantum state involves Uhlmanns approach (5.1.42), which is used extensively in Section 7 and Sjöqvist's et al. approach (5.2.22), used extensively in Section 6. Sjöqvist's approach states that the Uhlmann phase is an observable and provides the experimental groundworkusing an interferometer.􀀀This was later proven, by Du et al.[45] to reproduce experimental data (Figure 19) on page 56. The Uhlmann phase can be used to observe the behaviour of topological kinks. This was tested on 3 models, the Creutz-ladder, the Majorana chain andthe SSU-model. It is found that the Uhlmann phase is split into two regimes with the dividing parameter being the temperature. This temperature is called the critical temperature, Tc. If the temperatureis is below the critical temperature, the Uhlmann phase yields Π and if thetemperature is above the critical temperature, the Uhlmann phase yields zero.