Probing quench dynamics across a quantum phase transition into a 2D Ising antiferromagnet
Abstract
Simulating the real-time evolution of quantum spin systems far out of equilibrium poses a major theoretical challenge, especially in more than one dimension. We experimentally explore the dynamics of a two-dimensional Ising spin system with transverse and longitudinal fields as we quench it across a quantum phase transition from a paramagnet to an antiferromagnet. We realize the system with a near unit-occupancy atomic array of over 200 atoms obtained by loading a spin-polarized band insulator of fermionic lithium into an optical lattice and induce short-range interactions by direct excitation to a low-lying Rydberg state. Using site-resolved microscopy, we probe the correlations in the system after a sudden quench from the paramagnetic state and compare our measurements to exact calculations in the regime where it is possible. We achieve many-body states with longer-range antiferromagnetic correlations by implementing a near-adiabatic quench and study the buildup of correlations as we cross the quantum phase transition at different rates.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.1711.00887,
title = {Probing quench dynamics across a quantum phase transition into a 2D Ising antiferromagnet},
author = {Elmer Guardado-Sanchez and Peter T. Brown and Debayan Mitra and Trithep Devakul and David A. Huse and Peter Schauss and Waseem S. Bakr},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1711.00887},
year = {2018}
}