At present, there is a worldwide effort to use cold atoms to simulate strongly correlated quantum many-body systems. It is hoped that these "simulations" will provide solutions to many unsolved problems. However, the relevant energy scales in most of these experiments are so small that one has to go to entropy regimes far below those achievable today. Here, we present a general scheme to extract entropy directly from the region of interest. The late stage of this process is equivalent to a continuous "evaporation", and is able to combat intrinsic heating of the system. For illustration, we show how to cool a weak coupling BCS superfluid (with $T_{c}\sim 10^{-10}$K) to $10^{-11}$K with this simple procedure, with entropy per particle as low as $5\times 10^{-4}k_{B}$ in the superfluid region.
At present, there is a worldwide effort to use cold atoms to simulate strongly correlated quantum many-body systems. It is hoped that these "simulations" will provide solutions to many unsolved problems. However, the relevant energy scales in most of these experiments are so small that one has to go to entropy regimes far below those achievable today. Here, we present a general scheme to extract entropy directly from the region of interest. The late stage of this process is equivalent to a continuous "evaporation", and is able to combat intrinsic heating of the system. For illustration, we show how to cool a weak coupling BCS superfluid (with Tc∼10−10K) to 10−11K with this simple procedure, with entropy per particle as low as 5×10−4kB in the superfluid region.
Joint Quantum Institute and Condensed Matter Theory Center,Department of Physics, University of Maryland, College Park, MD 20742(Dated: November 29, 2009)At present, there is a worldwide e ort to use cold atoms to simulate strongly correlated quantummany-body systems. It is hoped that these \simulations will provide solutions to many unsolvedproblems. However, the relevant energy scales in most of these experiments are so small that onehas to go to entropy regimes far below those achievable today. Here, we present a general scheme toextract entropy directly from the region of interest. The late stage of this process is equivalent to acontinuous \evaporation, and is able to combat intrinsic heating of the system. For illustration, weshow how to cool a weak coupling BCS superuid (with T
Quantum simulation is a highly ambitious program in cold atom research currently being pursued in laboratories worldwide. The goal is to use cold atoms in optical lattices to simulate models for unsolved strongly correlated systems, so as to deduce their properties directly from experimental data. An important step in this effort is to determine the temperature of the system, which is essential for deducing all thermodynamic functions. This step, however, remains difficult for lattice systems at the moment. Here, we propose a method based on a generalized fluctuation-dissipation theorem. It does not rely on numerical simulations and gives a universal thermometry scheme for quantum gas systems including mixtures and spinor gases, provided that the local density approximation is valid.
At present, there is considerable interest in using atomic fermions in optical lattices to emulate the mathematical models that have been used to study strongly correlated electronic systems. Some of these models, such as the 2-dimensional fermion Hubbard model, are notoriously difficult to solve, and their key properties remain controversial despite decades of studies. It is hoped that the emulation experiments will shed light on some of these long-standing problems. A successful emulation, however, requires reaching temperatures as low as 10(-12) K and beyond, with entropy per particle far lower than what can be achieved today. Achieving such low-entropy states is an essential step and a grand challenge of the whole emulation enterprise. In this article, we point out a method to literally squeeze the entropy out from a Fermi gas into a surrounding Bose-Einstein condensed gas, which acts as a heat reservoir. This method allows one to reduce the entropy per particle of a lattice Fermi gas to a few percent of the lowest value obtainable today.
An advanced cooling scheme, incorporating entropy engineering, is vital for isolated artificial quantum systems designed to emulate the low-temperature physics of strongly correlated electron systems. This study theoretically demonstrates a cooling method employing multicomponent Fermi gases with SU(N)-symmetric interactions, focusing on the case of ^{173}Yb atoms in a two-dimensional optical lattice. Adiabatically introducing a nonuniform state-selective laser gives rise to two distinct subsystems: a central low-entropy region, exclusively composed of two specific spin components, acts as a quantum simulator for strongly correlated electron systems, while the surrounding N-component mixture retains a significant portion of the entropy of the system. The total particle numbers for each component are good quantum numbers, creating a sharp boundary for the two-component region. The cooling efficiency is assessed through extensive finite-temperature Lanczos calculations. The results lay the foundation for quantum simulations of two-dimensional systems of Hubbard or Heisenberg type, offering crucial insights into intriguing low-temperature phenomena in condensed-matter physics.
We propose and analyze a method for preparing low entropy many-body states in isolated quantum optical systems of atoms, ions, and molecules. Our approach is based upon shifting entropy between different regions of a system by spatially modulating the magnitude of the effective Hamiltonian. We conduct two case studies, on a topological spin chain and the spinful fermionic Hubbard model, focusing on the key question: can a "conformal cooling quench" remove sufficient entropy within experimentally accessible timescales? Finite-temperature, time-dependent matrix product state calculations reveal that even moderately sized bath regions can remove enough energy and entropy density to expose coherent low-temperature physics. The protocol is particularly natural in systems with long-range interactions, such as lattice-trapped polar molecules and Rydberg-excited atoms, where the magnitude of the Hamiltonian scales directly with the interparticle spacing. To this end, we propose simple, near-term implementations of conformal cooling quenches in systems of atoms or molecules, where signatures of low-temperature phases may be observed.
The field of quantum information has inspired new methods for cooling physical systems at the quantum scale by manipulating entropy in an algorithmic way, such as heat-bath algorithmic cooling (HBAC). These methods not only provide fundamental insight into quantum thermodynamics, but they are also at the core of practical applications in quantum science and quantum technologies. Arguably, the most promising practical applications are in quantum computing, for the preparation of pure states. The ability to prepare highly pure states is required both for initializing qubits in most quantum algorithms and for supplying reliable low-noise ancilla qubits that satisfy the fault-tolerance threshold for quantum error correction (achieving the high levels of purity required represents one of the major challenges not only for ensemble implementations but also for technologies with strong but not perfect projective measurements). \n \n \nThe heat bath algorithmic cooling protocols have inspired the work within this thesis, which examines and proposes powerful new techniques that significantly enhance cooling by taking advantage of classical and quantum correlations. These new methods go beyond the limits of conventional cooling techniques, providing a novel way to cool that allows a generalized interaction of the system with the environment, which has not been taken into account in previous work. Concretely, I have contributed to elucidating our understanding of these algorithmic cooling mechanisms by using techniques from quantum information theory and quantum thermodynamics. First, I found the analytical solution of the maximum achievable cooling of these algorithmic cooling methods, which had been a longstanding problem that remained open for almost 15 years. Then, I showed how to circumvent the cooling limits of the conventional algorithmic cooling – which were widely believed to be optimal –, creating novel methods that show how correlations can be used to significantly improve cooling. On the one hand, we fundamentally changed the way previous methods considered the interactions between the system and environment and showed how correlated relaxation processes can be essential for enhancing cooling. On the other hand, we demonstrated that correlations present in the initial state due to internal interactions can be exploited to improve cooling. Finally, we showed how, by using ideas and concepts from resource theory, it is possible to find the optimal entropy compression required for HBAC by studying the n-to-1 distillation of athermality of two level systems.