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arXiv:2011.05893 · APL Photonics

Bloch–Landau–Zener dynamics induced by a synthetic field in a photonic quantum walk

Alessio D’Errico, Raouf Barboza, Rebeca Tudor, Alexandre Dauphin, Pietro Massignan, Lorenzo Marrucci, Filippo Cardano

Published Feb 1, 2021• 21 citations
arXivHTMLPDF

Abstract

Quantum walks are processes that model dynamics in coherent systems. Their experimental implementations proved to be key to unveiling novel phenomena in Floquet topological insulators. Here, we realize a photonic quantum walk in the presence of a synthetic gauge field, which mimics the action of an electric field on a charged particle. By tuning the energy gaps between the two quasi-energy bands, we investigate intriguing system dynamics characterized by the interplay between Bloch oscillations and Landau–Zener transitions. When both gaps at quasi-energy values of 0 and π are vanishingly small, the Floquet dynamics follows a ballistic spreading.

DOI
10.1063/5.0037327

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Quantum walks are processes that model dynamics in coherent systems. Their experimental implementations proved to be key to unveiling novel phenomena in Floquet topological insulators. Here, we realize a photonic quantum walk in the presence of a synthetic gauge field, which mimics the action of an electric field on a charged particle. By tuning the energy gaps between the two quasi-energy bands, we investigate intriguing system dynamics characterized by the interplay between Bloch oscillations and Landau–Zener transitions. When both gaps at quasi-energy values of 0 and π are vanishingly small, the Floquet dynamics follows a ballistic spreading.
Theoretical analysis indicates that a spin qubit in a parabolic quantum wire, when driven by a bichromatic field, generates a confinement-tunable non-Abelian synthetic gauge field that gives rise to novel Floquet topological phenomena. In the low-confinement regime, the system exhibits topological Landau-Zener (LZ) transitions, chiral Landau-Zener-Stu¨\ddot{u}u¨ckelberg-Majorana (LZSM) interference, and non-Abelian geometric phases around diabolical points. These features enable holonomic quantum computation, as well as unconventional Floquet Bloch oscillations and fractal spectra. In contrast, in the strong confinement regime, narrow avoided crossings significantly suppress cross-coupling, thereby insulating the qubit from multi-photon LZSM interference. Quantitative Floquet-Lindblad analysis shows that the optimized gate times, determined by the biharmonic driving period and non-Abelian parameter-space loops, are sufficiently short to surpass primary environmental decoherence channels. When applied to high-mobility GaAs/AlGaAs\text{GaAs/AlGaAs}GaAs/AlGaAs core-shell nanowires, this approach converts spatial drives into robust non-Abelian gauge fields, positioning quantum wire systems as a versatile and scalable platform for fault-tolerant quantum information processing.
We report on the experimental realization of electric quantum walks, which mimic the effect of an electric field on a charged particle in a lattice. Starting from a textbook implementation of discrete-time quantum walks, we introduce an extra operation in each step to implement the effect of the field. The recorded dynamics of such a quantum particle exhibits features closely related to Bloch oscillations and interband tunneling. In particular, we explore the regime of strong fields, demonstrating contrasting quantum behaviors: quantum resonances versus dynamical localization depending on whether the accumulated Bloch phase is a rational or irrational fraction of 2π.
Floquet systems like quantum walks can exhibit anomalous topological boundary modes that have no stationary counterpart. Although the topological properties of synthetic gauge fields have been explored in quantum walks, these studies have so far focused on Abelian gauge fields. We theoretically introduce synthetic non-Abelian gauge fields for topological quantum walks and study their topological consequences. The photonic mesh lattice configuration is generalized with polarization multiplexing to achieve a four-dimensional Hilbert space, based on which we provide photonic building blocks for realizing various quantum walks in non-Abelian gauge fields. It is found that SU(2) gauge fields can lead to Peierls substitution in both momenta and quasienergy. In one and two dimensions, we describe detailed photonic setups to realize topological quantum walk protocols whose Floquet winding numbers and Rudner–Lindner–Berg–Levin invariants can be effectively controlled by the gauge fields. Finally, we show how non-Abelian gauge fields facilitate convenient simulation of entanglement in conjunction with polarization-dependent and spatial-mode-dependent coin operations. Our results shed light on the study of synthetic non-Abelian gauge fields in photonic Floquet systems and hold implications for time-multiplexed optical networks.
Bloch-Zener oscillations (BZO), i.e., the interplay between Bloch oscillations and Zener tunneling in two-band lattices under an external direct current (DC) force, are ubiquitous in different areas of wave physics, including photonics. While in Hermitian systems such oscillations are rather generally aperiodic and only accidentally periodic, in non-Hermitian (NH) lattices BZO can show a transition from aperiodic to periodic as a NH parameter in the system is varied. Remarkably, the phase transition can be either smooth or sharp, contrary to other types of NH phase transitions which are universally sharp. A discrete-time photonic quantum walk on a synthetic lattice is suggested for an experimental observation of smooth BZO phase transitions.
Temporal multiplexing provides an efficient and scalable approach to realize a quantum random walk with photons that can exhibit topological properties. But two-dimensional time-multiplexed topological quantum walks studied so far have relied on generalizations of the Su-Shreiffer-Heeger model with no synthetic gauge field. In this work, we demonstrate a two-dimensional topological quantum random walk where the nontrivial topology is due to the presence of a synthetic gauge field. We show that the synthetic gauge field leads to the appearance of multiple band gaps and, consequently, a spatial confinement of the quantum walk distribution. Moreover, we demonstrate topological edge states at an interface between domains with opposite synthetic fields. Our results expand the range of Hamiltonians that can be simulated using photonic quantum walks.