Quantum Catalysis of Magnetic Phase Transitions in a Quantum Simulator
Quantum Physics
2013-09-06 v2
Abstract
We control quantum fluctuations to create the ground state magnetic phases of a classical Ising model with a tunable longitudinal magnetic field using a system of 6 to 10 atomic ion spins. Due to the long-range Ising interactions, the various ground state spin configurations are separated by multiple first-order phase transitions, which in our zero temperature system cannot be driven by thermal fluctuations. We instead use a transverse magnetic field as a quantum catalyst to observe the first steps of the complete fractal devil's staircase, which emerges in the thermodynamic limit and can be mapped to a large number of many-body and energy-optimization problems.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.1303.6983,
title = {Quantum Catalysis of Magnetic Phase Transitions in a Quantum Simulator},
author = {Philip Richerme and Crystal Senko and Simcha Korenblit and Jacob Smith and Aaron Lee and Rajibul Islam and Wesley C. Campbell and Christopher Monroe},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1303.6983},
year = {2013}
}
Comments
New data in Fig. 3, and much of the paper rewritten