Many-Body Dephasing in a Trapped-Ion Quantum Simulator

Abstract

How a closed interacting quantum many-body system relaxes and dephases as a function of time is a fundamental question in thermodynamic and statistical physics. In this Letter, we analyze and observe the persistent temporal fluctuations after a quantum quench of a tunable long-range interacting transverse-field Ising Hamiltonian realized with a trapped-ion quantum simulator. We measure the temporal fluctuations in the average magnetization of a finite-size system of spin-1/2 particles. We experiment in a regime where the properties of the system are closely related to the integrable Hamiltonian with global spin-spin coupling, which enables analytical predictions for the long-time nonintegrable dynamics. The analytical expression for the temporal fluctuations predicts the exponential suppression of temporal fluctuations with increasing system size. Our measurement data is consistent with our theory predicting the regime of many-body dephasing.

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Kaplan, Harvey B., Guo, Lingzhen, Tan, Wen Lin, et al.. "Many-Body Dephasing in a Trapped-Ion Quantum Simulator." Physical Review Letters, 125, no. 12 (2020) American Physical Society: https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevLett.125.120605.

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Published by the American Physical Society under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license. Further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the published article's title, journal citation, and DOI.
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