[PAST EVENT] Physics Colloquium - Izabella Lovas

February 14, 2024
4pm - 5pm
Location
Small Hall, Room 111
300 Ukrop Way
Williamsburg, VA 23185Map this location
Access & Features
  • Open to the public
outdoors, outside, trees, flowers, summer, confusion corner, college corner, sign, logo

Izabella Lovas, Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics, Title of talk: Information spreading in quantum many-body systems

Abstract:
The rapid development of quantum simulators in the past decades has opened unprecedented possibilities to study quantum many-body systems. A wide range of Hamiltonians has been directly engineered in analog simulators, and provided crucial insights into quantum phases of matter, as well as into dynamical phenomena. This progress was accompanied by recent breakthroughs in digital quantum devices, promising to grant computational capacities far beyond the reach of classical architectures. This talk illustrates the opportunities and outstanding challenges presented by this rapidly developing field. In the first part, we demonstrate the power of combining theoretical approaches with experiments in a trapped ion quantum simulator, allowing us to identify and observe signatures of universal transport in a long-range interacting quantum magnet. We then turn to the challenges of protecting quantum coherence against environmental noise. In contrast to the general expectation that in an open system coherent information is quickly lost to the dissipative environment, we construct a regime of open quantum dynamics, functioning as a quantum error-correcting code which is dynamically protected against generic boundary noise. We comment on the implications of these results for designing robust quantum devices.

Sponsored by: Physics