arXiv:2404.12371 · Physical review. B./Physical review. B
Long-lived oscillations of metastable states in neutral atom systems
Siva Darbha, Milan Kornjača, Fangli Liu, J. T. Balewski, Mark R. Hirsbrunner, Pedro L. S. Lopes, Sheng-Tao Wang, Roel Van Beeumen, Katherine Klymko, Daan Camps
Metastable states arise in a range of quantum systems and can be observed in various dynamical scenarios, including decay, bubble nucleation, and long-lived oscillations. The phenomenology of metastable states has been examined in quantum many-body systems, notably in one-dimensional (1D) ferromagnetic Ising spin systems and superfluids. In this paper, we study long-lived oscillations of metastable and ground states in 1D antiferromagnetic neutral atom chains with long-range Rydberg interactions. We use a staggered local detuning field to achieve confinement. Using theoretical and numerical models, we identify novel spectral signatures of quasiparticle oscillations distinct to antiferromagnetic neutral atom systems and interpret them using a classical energy model of short-range meson repulsion. Finally, we evaluate the experimental accessibility of our proposed setup on current neutral-atom platforms and discuss experimental feasibility and constraints.
Metastable states arise in a range of quantum systems and can be observed in various dynamical scenarios, including decay, bubble nucleation, and long-lived oscillations. The phenomenology of metastable states has been examined in quantum many-body systems, notably in one-dimensional (1D) ferromagnetic Ising spin systems and superfluids. In this paper, we study long-lived oscillations of metastable and ground states in 1D antiferromagnetic neutral atom chains with long-range Rydberg interactions. We use a staggered local detuning field to achieve confinement. Using theoretical and numerical models, we identify novel spectral signatures of quasiparticle oscillations distinct to antiferromagnetic neutral atom systems and interpret them using a classical energy model of short-range meson repulsion. Finally, we evaluate the experimental accessibility of our proposed setup on current neutral-atom platforms and discuss experimental feasibility and constraints.
Metastable states of quantum many-body systems with confinement offer a means to simulate false vacuum phenomenology, including nonequilibrium dynamical processes like decay by nucleation, in truncated limits. Recent work has examined the decay process in one-dimensional (1D) ferromagnetic Ising spins and superfluids. In this paper, we study nucleation dynamics in 1D antiferromagnetic neutral atom chains with Rydberg interactions, using both numerical simulations and analytic modeling. We apply a staggered local detuning field to generate the metastable and ground states. Our efforts focus on two dynamical regimes: decay and annealing. In the first, we corroborate the phenomenological decay rate scaling and determine the associated parameter range for the decay process; in the second, we uncover and elucidate a procedure to anneal the metastable state from the initial to the final system, with intermediate nucleation events. We further propose experimental protocols to prepare the required states and perform quenches on near-term neutral atom quantum simulators, examining the experimental feasibility of our proposed setup and parameter regime.
We present a mathematical theory of metastable pure states in closed many-body quantum systems with finite-dimensional Hilbert space. Given a Hamiltonian, a pure state is defined to be metastable when all sufficiently local operators either stabilize the state or raise its average energy. We prove that short-range-entangled metastable states are necessarily eigenstates (scars) of a perturbatively close Hamiltonian. Given any metastable eigenstate of a Hamiltonian, in the presence of perturbations, we prove the presence of prethermal behavior: Local correlation functions decay at a rate bounded by a timescale nonperturbatively long in the inverse metastability radius, rather than Fermi’s golden rule. Inspired by this general theory, we prove that the lifetime of the false vacuum in certain d -dimensional quantum models grows at least as fast as exp ( ε − d ) , where ε → 0 is the relative energy density of the false vacuum; this lower bound matches, for the first time, explicit calculations using quantum field theory. We identify metastable states at finite energy density in the PXP model, along with exponentially many metastable states in “helical” spin chains and the two-dimensional Ising model. Our inherently quantum formalism reveals precise connections between many problems, including prethermalization, robust quantum scars, and quantum nucleation theory, and applies to systems without known semiclassical and/or field-theoretic limits.
Neutral-atom quantum simulators offer a promising approach to the exploration of strongly interacting many-body systems, with applications spanning condensed matter, statistical mechanics, and high-energy physics. Through a combination of quantum experiments, numerical calculations, and analytical methods, we demonstrate a rich set of phenomena accessible on such quantum simulators by studying an array of Rydberg atoms placed on the Lieb lattice. First, we map out the ground states and phase diagram of the system, identifying a range of density-wave-ordered phases -- including a collinear phase stabilized purely by quantum fluctuations -- and find good agreement between theory and experiment. Allowing for local control of the detuning field thereafter, we discover a quantum analog of the classical liquid-vapor transition between two density-wave phases distinguished by sublattice occupation, and probe its underlying hysteretic dynamics. Furthermore, we study out-of-equilibrium quantum quenches and observe anomalously slow relaxation dynamics consistent with the kinetic constraints of an emergent string phase. These results highlight how geometric control offered by neutral-atom simulators can extend the frontiers of programmable quantum matter, enabling access to complex phases, metastability, and thermalization dynamics in many-body quantum systems.
We apply a recently developed theory for metastability in open quantum systems to a one-dimensional dissipative quantum Ising model. Earlier results suggest this model features either a nonequilibrium phase transition or a smooth but sharp crossover, where the stationary state changes from paramagnetic to ferromagnetic, accompanied by strongly intermittent emission dynamics characteristic of first-order coexistence between dynamical phases. We show that for a range of parameters close to this transition or crossover point the dynamics of the finite system displays pronounced metastability, i.e., the system relaxes first to long-lived metastable states before eventual relaxation to the true stationary state. From the spectral properties of the quantum master operator we characterize the low-dimensional manifold of metastable states, which are shown to be probability mixtures of two, paramagnetic and ferromagnetic, metastable phases. We also show that for long times the dynamics can be approximated by a classical stochastic dynamics between the metastable phases that is directly related to the intermittent dynamics observed in quantum trajectories and thus the dynamical phases.
Abstract Metastability is ubiquitous in nature and is observed through the crossing of an energy barrier toward a configuration of lower energy as, for example, in chemical processes [1] or electron field ionization [2]. In classical many-body systems, metastability naturally emerges in the presence of a first-order phase transition and finds a prototypical example in supercooled vapour. In the last decades, the extension to quantum field theory and quantum many-body systems has attracted significant interest in the context of statistical physics [3, 4], protein folding [5, 6], and cosmology [7–9], where thermal and quantum fluctuations are expected to trigger the transition from the metastable state (false vacuum) to the ground state (real vacuum) via the probabilistic nucleation of spatially localized bubbles [10, 11]. However, the long-standing theoretical progress in estimating the relaxation rate of the metastable field via bubble nucleation has not yet found a counterpart in terms of experimental observations. Here we experimentally observe and characterize bubble nucleation in isolated and coherently-coupled atomic superfluids, and support our observations with numerical simulations. The agreement between our results and a novel analytic formula based on instanton theory confirms the quantum-field character of the observed decay, and promotes coherently-coupled atomic superfluids as emulators of out-of-equilibrium quantum field phenomena.
A recent experiment on a 51-atom Rydberg-blockaded chain observed anomalously long-lived temporal oscillations of local observables after quenching from an antiferromagnetic initial state. This coherence is surprising as the initial state should have thermalized rapidly to infinite temperature. In this Rapid Communication, we show that the experimental Hamiltonian exhibits nonthermal behavior across its entire many-body spectrum, with similar finite-size scaling properties as models proximate to integrable points. Moreover, we construct an explicit small local deformation of the Hamiltonian which enhances both the signatures of integrability and the coherent oscillations observed after the quench. Our results suggest that a parent proximate integrable point controls the early-to-intermediate time dynamics of the experimental system. The distinctive quench dynamics in the parent model could signal an unconventional class of integrable system.