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Studies of non-equilibrium behavior of quantum many-body systems using the adiabatic eigenstate deformations

Mohit Pandey

Published Jan 1, 2021• 0 citations
OpenAlex

Abstract

In the last few decades, the study of many-body quantum systems far from equilibrium has risen to prominence, with exciting developments on both experimental and theoretical physics fronts. In this dissertation, we will focus particularly on the adiabatic gauge potential (AGP), which is the generator of adiabatic deformations between quantum eigenstates and also related to "fidelity susceptibility", as our lens into the general phenomenon. In the first two projects, the AGP is studied in the context of counter-diabatic driving protocols which present a way of generating adiabatic dynamics at an arbitrary pace. This is quite useful as adiabatic evolution, which is a common strategy for manipulating quantum states, is inherently a slow process and is, therefore, susceptible to noise and decoherence from the environment. However, obtaining and implementing the AGP in many-body systems is a formidable task, requiring knowledge of the spectral properties of the instantaneous Hamiltonians and control of highly nonlocal multibody interactions. We show how an approximate gauge potential can be systematically built up as a series of nested commutators, remaining well-defined in the thermodynamic limit. Furthermore, the resulting counter-diabatic driving protocols can be realized up to arbitrary order without leaving the available control space using tools from periodically-driven (Floquet) systems. In the first project, this driving protocol was successfully implemented on the electronic spin of a nitrogen vacancy in diamond as a proof of concept and in the second project, it was extended to many-body systems, where it was shown the resulting Floquet protocols significantly suppress dissipation and provide a drastic increase in fidelity. In the third project, the AGP is studied in the context of quantum chaos wherein it is found to be an extremely sensitive probe. We are able to detect transitions from non-ergodic to ergodic behavior at perturbation strengths orders of magnitude smaller than those required for standard measures. Using this alternative probe in two generic classes of spin chains, we show that the chaotic threshold decreases exponentially with system size and that one can immediately detect integrability-breaking (chaotic) perturbations by analyzing infinitesimal perturbations even at the integrable point. In some cases, small integrability-breaking is shown to lead to anomalously slow relaxation of the system, exponentially long in system size. This work paves the way for further studies in various areas such as quantum computation, quantum state preparation and quantum chaos.

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•Sep 29, 2020•5 citations
In the last few decades, the study of many-body quantum systems far from equilibrium has risen to prominence, with exciting developments on both experimental and theoretical physics fronts. In this dissertation, we will focus particularly on the adiabatic gauge potential (AGP), which is the generator of adiabatic deformations between quantum eigenstates and also related to "fidelity susceptibility", as our lens into the general phenomenon. In the first two projects, the AGP is studied in the context of counter-diabatic driving protocols which present a way of generating adiabatic dynamics at an arbitrary pace. This is quite useful as adiabatic evolution, which is a common strategy for manipulating quantum states, is inherently a slow process and is, therefore, susceptible to noise and decoherence from the environment. However, obtaining and implementing the AGP in many-body systems is a formidable task, requiring knowledge of the spectral properties of the instantaneous Hamiltonians and control of highly nonlocal multibody interactions. We show how an approximate gauge potential can be systematically built up as a series of nested commutators, remaining well-defined in the thermodynamic limit. Furthermore, the resulting counter-diabatic driving protocols can be realized up to arbitrary order without leaving the available control space using tools from periodically-driven (Floquet) systems. In the first project, this driving protocol was successfully implemented on the electronic spin of a nitrogen vacancy in diamond as a proof of concept and in the second project, it was extended to many-body systems, where it was shown the resulting Floquet protocols significantly suppress dissipation and provide a drastic increase in fidelity. In the third project, the AGP is studied in the context of quantum chaos wherein it is found to be an extremely sensitive probe. We are able to detect transitions from non-ergodic to ergodic behavior at perturbation strengths orders of magnitude smaller than those required for standard measures. Using this alternative probe in two generic classes of spin chains, we show that the chaotic threshold decreases exponentially with system size and that one can immediately detect integrability-breaking (chaotic) perturbations by analyzing infinitesimal perturbations even at the integrable point. In some cases, small integrability-breaking is shown to lead to anomalously slow relaxation of the system, exponentially long in system size. This work paves the way for further studies in various areas such as quantum computation, quantum state preparation and quantum chaos.
In the past decades, it was recognized that quantum chaos, which is essential for the emergence of statistical mechanics and thermodynamics, manifests itself in the effective description of the eigenstates of chaotic Hamiltonians through random matrix ensembles and the eigenstate thermalization hypothesis.Standard measures of chaos in quantum many-body systems are level statistics and the spectral form factor.In this work, we show that the norm of the adiabatic gauge potential, the generator of adiabatic deformations between eigenstates, serves as a much more sensitive measure of quantum chaos.We are able to detect transitions from integrable to chaotic behavior at perturbation strengths orders of magnitude smaller than those required for standard measures.Using this alternative probe in two generic classes of spin chains, we show that the chaotic threshold decreases exponentially with system size and that one can immediately detect integrability-breaking (chaotic) perturbations by analyzing infinitesimal perturbations even at the integrable point.In some cases, small integrability breaking is shown to lead to anomalously slow relaxation of the system, exponentially long in system size.
Counterdiabatic (CD) driving presents a way of generating adiabatic dynamics at an arbitrary pace, where excitations due to nonadiabaticity are exactly compensated by adding an auxiliary driving term to the Hamiltonian. While this CD term is theoretically known and given by the adiabatic gauge potential, obtaining and implementing this potential in many-body systems is a formidable task, requiring knowledge of the spectral properties of the instantaneous Hamiltonians and control of highly nonlocal multibody interactions. We show how an approximate gauge potential can be systematically built up as a series of nested commutators, remaining well defined in the thermodynamic limit. Furthermore, the resulting CD driving protocols can be realized up to arbitrary order without leaving the available control space using tools from periodically driven (Floquet) systems. This is illustrated on few- and many-body quantum systems, where the resulting Floquet protocols significantly suppress dissipation and provide a drastic increase in fidelity.
Counterdiabatic driving provides a universal route to fast quantum control, but its standard formulation presupposes a Hamiltonian generator. We develop a Hamiltonian-free theory of the adiabatic gauge potential (AGP) for parameter-dependent unitary operators UλU_λUλ​. Exact and regularized versions of the AGP follow from a Hermitian, banded linear system at a cost comparable to the Lanczos construction in the Hermitian case, requiring neither diagonalization nor a matrix logarithm. We demonstrate rapid convergence of the truncated Krylov approximation for the kicked top and for an integrable brickwork circuit built from unitary Rˇ\check{R}Rˇ matrices, a setting in which no local effective Hamiltonian is available. Our results extend shortcuts to adiabaticity, and AGP-based diagnostics of chaos, to Floquet systems and quantum circuits.
Periodically driven quantum systems have emerged as one of the most versatile tools for quantum simulation, enabling the engineering of effective Hamiltonians, topological phases, and inherently nonequilibrium phenomena such as discrete time crystals. Yet fundamental challenges persist: from a spectral ambiguity that precludes a unique Floquet ground state to an inability to manipulate Floquet eigenstates beyond the adiabatic regime. This thesis demonstrates that counterdiabatic driving—a technique from adiabatic quantum control—provides a unifying framework to address these challenges. We first show that the periodic lab-frame Hamiltonian generates counterdiabatic driving for the Floquet eigenstates, revealing Floquet theory as an inverse counterdiabatic driving problem. Exploiting this equivalence, we develop geometric Floquet theory: a reformulation based on the parallel-transport gauge, which uniquely decomposes Floquet dynamics into a geometric contribution, encoded in Berry phases, and a dynamical contribution, generated by the average-energy operator. The average-energy operator provides an unambiguous sorting of the quasienergy spectrum, identifies a unique Floquet ground state at all drive frequencies, and serves as a sensitive diagnostic for heating and symmetry-breaking transitions. Inherently nonequilibrium phenomena—the 𝜋-quasienergy splitting of discrete time crystals and the anomalous edge modes of Floquet topological insulators—are traced to geometric phases. On the practical side, we exploit the intrinsic robustness of prethermal discrete time crystals for a highly frequency-selective DTC-based AC magnetic field sensing scheme and demonstrate it experimentally on a nuclear spin quantum simulator. We then generalize counterdiabatic driving to periodically driven systems. In particular, we derive a non-perturbative variational principle for the Floquet adiabatic gauge potential; this yields local, experimentally feasible control protocols for transitionless manipulation of Floquet states. We demonstrate this formalism on Floquet state preparation in an ultracold atom quantum simulator and many-body state transfer across a quantum phase transition, with significant improvements over unassisted protocols in both cases.
We revisit the problem of integrability breaking in free fermionic quantum spin chains. We investigate the so-called adiabatic gauge potential (AGP), which was recently proposed as an accurate probe of quantum chaos. We also study the so-called weak integrability breaking, which occurs if the dynamical effects of the perturbation do not appear at leading order in the perturbing parameter. A recent statement in the literature claimed that integrability breaking should generally lead to an exponential growth of the AGP norm with respect to the volume. However, afterwards it was found that weak integrability breaking is a counter-example, leading to a cross-over between polynomial and exponential growth. Here we show that in free fermionic systems the AGP norm always grows polynomially, if the perturbation is local with respect to the fermions, even if the perturbation strongly breaks integrability. As a by-product of our computations we also find, that in free fermionic spin chains there are operators which weakly break integrability, but which are not associated with known long range deformations.
Non-equilibrium phenomena in quantum physics are ubiquitous in current research because of their extremely rich phenomenology. Among them, adiabatic processes are particularly interesting because they connect two of the cornerstone of modern condensed matter theory: topological phases of matter and quantum information. Indeed with adiabatic periodic driving, it is possible to engineer exotic non-equilibrium phases with tunable topological properties, which are of great interest for both fundamental research and future quantum technologies. Adiabatic processes can also be used to implement optimization processes on quantum hardware and lie at the basis of hybrid quantum-classical algorithms that are extremely promising for near-term quantum devices. In this thesis, I focus on these two aspects of adiabatic dynamics in quantum systems. In the first part, I investigate the robustness of topological phases, arising in periodically driven systems, with respect to the driving protocol and disorder. In particular, I show that quantized transport and Anderson localization coexist in one-dimensional systems displaying Thouless pumping, because of a delocalization-localization transition in the Floquet spectrum. This transition is linked to the topological nature of the adiabatic driving and disappears if the phase is trivial in the clean limit. In the second part, I study one of the most popular hybrid optimization method, the quantum approximate optimization algorithm (QAOA). I show that QAOA can tackle the first-order phase transition arising in the infinite range p-spin model with polynomial resources, in stark contrast with adiabatic quantum computation, which requires exponentially long evolution time to reach similar performances. Finally, I present an approach to QAOA based on reinforcement learning (RL). Interestingly, the RL agent automatically adopts strategies that converge towards optimal adiabatic schedules and that can be easily transferred between systems with different sizes, even in the presence of disorder.