We investigate coupled dynamics of spinless fermions on a one-dimensional lattice and spins on the links. When the hopping integral and the on-site potential of the fermions depend on the direction of the link spins, the low-energy effective theory predicts that the link spins behave as a dynamical axion field in 1+1 dimensions. The axion field $θ$ is coupled to the electric field $E$ as $θE$, through which the link spins rotate in response to the applied electric field or the chemical potential gradient for charge-neutral fermions. This is the inverse phenomenon of Thouless pumping in the Rice-Mele model. After analyzing the dynamics by approximating the link spins with the classical ones and utilizing the axion Lagrangian, we show the full-quantum dynamics using the tensor network method. Even though we do not explicitly introduce the axion Lagrangian in solving the fermion-spin coupled many-body dynamics, the full-quantum results agree well with those with the classical spin approximation, including the dynamics of the axion field and fermion transport. In addition, we find that the quantum correlation between spins accelerates the dynamics of axion fields as the suppression of the expectation values of the link spins allows them to rotate easily. We also propose a possible experimental setup for cold-atomic systems to implement the Hamiltonian in this study.
We investigate coupled dynamics of spinless fermions on a one-dimensional lattice and spins on the links. When the hopping integral and the on-site potential of the fermions depend on the direction of the link spins, the low-energy effective theory predicts that the link spins behave as a dynamical axion field in 1+1 dimensions. The axion field θ is coupled to the electric field E as θE, through which the link spins rotate in response to the applied electric field or the chemical potential gradient for charge-neutral fermions. This is the inverse phenomenon of Thouless pumping in the Rice-Mele model. After analyzing the dynamics by approximating the link spins with the classical ones and utilizing the axion Lagrangian, we show the full-quantum dynamics using the tensor network method. Even though we do not explicitly introduce the axion Lagrangian in solving the fermion-spin coupled many-body dynamics, the full-quantum results agree well with those with the classical spin approximation, including the dynamics of the axion field and fermion transport. In addition, we find that the quantum correlation between spins accelerates the dynamics of axion fields as the suppression of the expectation values of the link spins allows them to rotate easily. We also propose a possible experimental setup for cold-atomic systems to implement the Hamiltonian in this study.
The implementation and characterization of minimal instances of complex many-body systems have fundamental importance for the development of quantum simulators. This thesis reports on the implementation of two such minimal instances: a minimal instance for ℤ₂ lattice gauge theories coupled to matter and a minimal instance for spin pumping. ℤ₂ lattice gauge theories are characterized by a ℤ₂ gauge degree-of-freedom on every lattice link. Matter particles moving across these links pick up a phase depending on the traversed link's gauge field. To conserve the local gauge symmetry during this motion, also the gauge field itself changes. A corresponding minimal instance consists of a single matter particle on two lattice sites, which are connected by a link. The presented implementation of this minimal instance is based on two-component ultracold rubidium atoms in a periodically-driven optical double-well potential with a state-dependent energy offset between neighboring sites. In this implementation, one component represents the matter, while the other component represents the gauge field. The resulting effective Floquet Hamiltonian exhibits ℤ₂ symmetry for specific modulation parameters, if the periodic driving is resonant with the on-site interaction energy. The dynamics was investigated for different initial states and compared to a numerical analysis. This numerical analysis is in agreement with the measurements and reveals nontrivial dynamics as expected from a ℤ₂ lattice gauge theory coupled to matter. Furthermore, symmetry-breaking terms are identified and routes to overcome these limitations are discussed. Finally, a way to couple minimal instances to a one-dimensional extended system is proposed. The results constitute a first step towards quantum simulation of gauge theories and provide important insights for future studies using Floquet-based techniques. A quantum spin pump generates a spin transport in response to a cyclic and adiabatic variation of a one-dimensional Hamiltonian. The spins are transported in opposite directions and thereby exhibit a vanishing charge transport. In a spin-conserving system with homogeneously filled bands, the spin transport per pump cycle is quantized and deeply connected to the pump cycle's topology. Therefore, such a spin pump can be interpreted as a dynamical version of a two-dimensional time-reversal symmetric quantum spin Hall system. In the experiment, a minimal instance of such a spin pump was implemented with ultracold rubidium atoms in an optical double-well potential. In the limit of piecewise isolated instances throughout the pump cycle, where each instance shifts by one lattice site per half pump cycle, a one-dimensional spin pump is realized. To characterize the response of the pump, the spin separation and the occurring spin currents are measured. For the detection of the spin separation, the center-of-mass positions of both spin components are analyzed in in-situ absorption images. For the detection of spin currents, a novel detection method was developed, which connects the superexchange oscillations after a projection onto static double wells to the instantaneous spin current. This newly developed method can be applied to a general class of systems and in combination with single-site detection, it also allows for a local detection of instantaneous spin currents. The results demonstrate a corner stone for the implementation of a spin pump, which can be extended, e.g. by adding time-reversal-invariant spin--orbit interactions or by breaking time-reversal symmetry. This extension then results either in a system described by a nontrivial ℤ₂ invariant or a quantum spin Hall system described by a spin-Chern number.
We discuss a new method to perform numerical simulations of one-dimensional systems with fermion and boson degrees of freedom. The method is based on a direct-space, imaginary-time representation of the fermion field. It is fast so that systems having up to 100 sites can easily be simulated. In addition, the method provides an intuitive physical "picture" of the ground state of a one-dimensional many-body system. We discuss in detail how to implement the method and how to compute various physical quantities. In particular, we show how to extend the method to study averages of off-diagonal quantities in an occupation-number representation. To assess the accuracy of our procedure, we apply it to free fermions in one dimension and compare with exact results. We then study a model of spinless interacting fermions and obtain the expected phase structure and behavior of correlation functions. We also consider the extended Hubbard model at various points in its phase diagram and study the behavior of spin-density, charge-density, and pairing correlation functions. We then study the Gross-Neveu model and show how the behavior depends on the number of fermion flavors. Finally, we consider an electron-phonon model and study its behavior both in the one-particle polaron sector and in the half-filled-band case. Along the way we show pictures of the ground-state configurations that give physical insight into the properties of the systems, like charge-density-wave, spin-density-wave, and superconducting states, "fractional charges," and solitons. We conclude by comparing our method with other methods and discuss the possibility of extending it to higher dimensions.
Abstract Quantum link models (QLMs) offer the realistic prospect for the practical implementation of lattice quantum electrodynamics (QED) on modern quantum simulators, and they provide a venue for exploring various nonergodic phenomena relevant to quantum many-body physics. In these models, gauge and electric fields are represented by spin- S operators. So far, large-scale realizations of QLMs have been restricted to S = 1/2 representations, whereas the lattice-QED limit is approached at S → ∞ . Here, we present a bosonic mapping for the representation of gauge and electric fields with effective spin- S operators for arbitrarily large values of S . Based on this mapping, we then propose an experimental scheme for the realization of a large-scale spin-1 U(1) QLM using spinless bosons in an optical superlattice. Using perturbation theory and infinite matrix product state calculations, which work directly in the thermodynamic limit, we demonstrate the faithfulness of the mapping and stability of gauge invariance throughout all accessible evolution times. We further demonstrate the potential of our proposed quantum simulator to address relevant high-energy physics by probing the (de)confinement of an electron–positron pair by tuning the gauge coupling. Our work provides an essential step towards gauge-theory quantum simulators in the quantum-field-theory limit.
Quantum many-body physics has been studied for many decades. A lot of intriguing phenomena have been observed and theories have been developed. Yet many problems remain unsolved, which is largely due to a lack of general efficient classical computation method. One-dimensional (1D) systems have also drawn much attention over the past few decades. One reason is that many unique strongly correlated quantum phenomena only appear in low dimensions. Another reason is that many exact results can be obtained in 1D for cross benchmarking, such as Bethe Ansatz, Bosonization, Bose-Fermi mapping, etc. In addition, many numerical methods, such as Matrix-Product-State based and Monte Carlo methods, work most efficiently in 1D. In recent years, 1D quantum gases have been realized in many cold atom labs, providing experimental motivation for their studies. One of the most mysterious assumptions about a system of identical quantum particles is that the wavefunction must be symmetric (for bosons) or anti-symmetric (for fermions). This means that no two fermions can occupy the same state, while multiple occupancy is allowed for bosons. Bosons and fermions are therefore generally very different. But in 1D this distinction could become rather subtle, provided that the bosonic multiple occupancy is suppressed, which can happen if strong repulsion exists between them. However, when considering spin degrees of freedom, things become more complicated. In this work, we develop a generalized Bose-Fermi mapping theory, under which, the charge degrees of freedom is mapped to a spinless fermions, while the spin degrees of freedom to an effective spin chain. This mapping works for arbitrary spin, arbitrary trapping potentials, arbitrary spin-dependent interaction potential, and for either spinor bosons or fermions. In the strong interaction limit, the wavefunction of the system is represented by the strong coupling ansatz wavefunction (SCAW), which takes the form of a direct product of spinless fermions wavefunction and spin wavefunction. Using this mapping technique, we study the dynamics and collective modes of the system. Furthermore, we develop a very efficient method to calculate the one-body density matrix, from which we can calculate the momentum distribution of the system.
The study of quantum dynamics is an increasingly important aspect of atomic, molecular and optical physics, as well as condensed-matter physics and other disciplines. It is essential in order to understand non-equilibrium phenomena which do not fit within the framework of equilibrium thermodynamics, such as many-body localization, dynamical quantum phase transitions, and non-equilibrium steady states in driven-dissipative systems. However, the exact calculation of dynamical observables is extremely difficult in general for several reasons, which makes it challenging for theoretical predictions and analyses to keep pace with rapidly advancing experiments. In this thesis I use and develop several computational methods to investigate the dynamics of quantum many-body systems, with the two goals of better understanding the evolution of local observables and correlation functions in spin and Fermion systems as well as creating and testing more effective numerical methods for solving quantum dynamics problems. I explore quantum dynamics by using Hamiltonian parameter quenches in several commonly-used models in AMO physics and elsewhere: the Fermi-Hubbard model, the XXZ model, and the transverse-Ising model. The first represents a system of short-range interacting Fermions, while the latter two represent spin systems with different spin-spin couplings and magnetic field terms. All of these models can be realized in current experiments. First, I derive an exact solution for an extreme interaction quench in the Fermi-Hubbard model, from a strongly-interacting initial state to a noninteracting final Hamiltonian. From this result I show that there are nontrivial transient connected correlations, despite the fact that the system has very high temperature and a noninteracting Hamiltonian. Those features would suppress such correlations in equilibrium, but the dynamical correlations are still significant. Then, I develop and examine two numerical methods for solving dynamics of the spin expectation values and correlation functions in the transverse-Ising and XXZ models. Both methods rely on approximating a thermodynamically large system with a much smaller and more computationally tractable cluster of lattice sites, or a series of clusters. The first method is a dynamical numerical linked cluster expansion (NLCE). NLCEs have already been used successfully on systems in thermodynamic equilibrium, and I extended the technique to directly compute the dynamics of an observable after a quantum quench. I review the general NLCE method, describe my dynamical variant of it, and compute the quench dynamics of spin and correlation observables in the transverse-Ising and XXZ models. The second method, which I term the adaptive-boundary cluster method, relies on recently refined bounds on information propagation in quantum systems to choose a cluster of lattice sites that minimizes the finite size error bound of a dynamical computation. I briefly review these bounds, and describe a new algorithm which uses them to construct a cluster whose boundary is chosen according to a related error estimate. Such an adaptive-boundary cluster has the property that there exists a computable upper bound on the finite size error of observables measured at the cluster center, and this error bound is nearly minimal when compared to that of other clusters of the same size. I then compute the quench dynamics of spin and correlation observables in the transverse-Ising model using the adaptive boundary clusters. I apply this method to both uniform and strongly disordered systems. To evaluate the effectiveness of both dynamical NLCE and adaptive-boundary clusters, I compare the results obtained using them to results from a standard and general purpose numerical method: exact solvers applied a rectangular cluster with periodic boundary conditions. Both of the new methods usually converge faster and are more accurate than the standard method for comparable cluster sizes. This thesis illustrates that choosing numerical methods which take advantage of the geometric and entanglement structure of the initial state and Hamiltonian can substantially enhance our ability to study quantum dynamics, by reducing the computational cost of numerically exact solutions. I conclude with a discussion of various avenues for future research to build on this work.
Spin-SU(1) Quantum Link Models with Dynamical Matter on a Quantum Simulator
Quantum link models (QLMs) offer the realistic prospect for the practical implementation of lattice quantum electrodynamics (QED) on modern quantum simulators, and they provide a venue for exploring various nonergodic phenomena relevant to quantum many-body physics. In these models, gauge and electric fields are represented by spin-S operators. So far, large-scale realizations of QLMs have been restricted to S=1/2 representations, whereas the lattice-QED limit is approached at S→∞. Here, we present a bosonic mapping for the representation of gauge and electric fields with effective spin-S operators for arbitrarily large values of S. Based on this mapping, we then propose an experimental scheme for the realization of a large-scale spin-1U(1) QLM using spinless bosons in an optical superlattice. Using perturbation theory and infinite matrix product state calculations, which work directly in the thermodynamic limit, we demonstrate the faithfulness of the mapping and stability of gauge invariance throughout all accessible evolution times. We further demonstrate the potential of our proposed quantum simulator to address relevant high-energy physics by probing the (de)confinement of an electron--positron pair by tuning the gauge coupling. Our work provides an essential step towards gauge-theory quantum simulators in the quantum-field-theory limit.