Hengyan Wang

Measuring Out-of-Time-Order Correlators on a Nuclear Magnetic Resonance Quantum Simulator

The idea of the out-of-time-order correlator (OTOC) has recently emerged in the study of both condensed matter systems and gravitational systems. It not only plays a key role in investigating the holographic duality between a strongly interacting quantum system and a gravitational system, but also diagnoses the chaotic behavior of many-body quantum systems and characterizes the information scrambling. Based on the OTOCs, three different concepts -- quantum chaos, holographic duality, and information scrambling -- are found to be intimately related to each other. Despite of its theoretical importance, the experimental measurement of the OTOC is quite challenging and so far there is no experimental measurement of the OTOC for local operators. Here we report the measurement of OTOCs of local operators for an Ising spin chain on a nuclear magnetic resonance quantum simulator. We observe that the OTOC behaves differently in the integrable and non-integrable cases. Based on the recent discovered relationship between OTOCs and the growth of entanglement entropy in the many-body system, we extract the entanglement entropy from the measured OTOCs, which clearly shows that the information entropy oscillates in time for integrable models and scrambles for non-intgrable models. With the measured OTOCs, we also obtain the experimental result of the butterfly velocity, which measures the speed of correlation propagation. Our experiment paves a way for experimentally studying quantum chaos, holographic duality, and information scrambling in many-body quantum systems with quantum simulators.

Gelcasting of La0.6Sr0.4Co0.8Fe0.2O3-δ from oxide and carbonate powders

Abstract Perovskite ceramics have been successfully prepared by gelcasting from oxide and carbonate powders, which is characterized by sintering homogeneous gelcast obtained from a dense suspension of insoluble or low-solubility metal-oxide precursors and organic monomers. Especially, the porous perovskite ceramics can be obtained by controlling sintering process. Gelcasting of La0.6Sr0.4-Co0.8Fe0.2O3-δ was used to illustrate the process. The porosity, pore size, gas permeability and microstructure of the ceramics obtained were also characterized. This work shows that the obtained specimens are good enough for practical use and this preparation routine is very promising for preparing porous perovskite ceramics due to the specific advantages of simple processing. ©.

Quantum Image Processing and Its Application to Edge Detection: Theory and Experiment

Processing of digital images is continuously gaining in volume and relevance, with concomitant demands on data storage, transmission and processing power. Encoding the image information in quantum-mechanical systems instead of classical ones and replacing classical with quantum information processing may alleviate some of these challenges. By encoding and processing the image information in quantum-mechanical systems, we here demonstrate the framework of quantum image processing, where a pure quantum state encodes the image information: we encode the pixel values in the probability amplitudes and the pixel positions in the computational basis states. Our quantum image representation reduces the required number of qubits compared to existing implementations, and we present image processing algorithms that provide exponential speed-up over their classical counterparts. For the commonly used task of detecting the edge of an image, we propose and implement a quantum algorithm that completes the task with only one single-qubit operation, independent of the size of the image. This demonstrates the potential of quantum image processing for highly efficient image and video processing in the big data era.

Experimental Test of Heisenberg's Measurement Uncertainty Relation Based on Statistical Distances

Incompatible observables can be approximated by compatible observables in joint measurement or measured sequentially, with constrained accuracy as implied by Heisenbergs original formulation of the uncertainty principle. Recently, Busch, Lahti, and Werner proposed inaccuracy trade-off relations based on statistical distances between probability distributions of measurement outcomes [P. Busch et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 111, 160405 (2013); P. Busch et al., Phys. Rev. A 89, 012129 (2014)]. Here we reformulate their theoretical framework, derive an improved relation for qubit measurement, and perform an experimental test on a spin system. The relation reveals that the worst-case inaccuracy is tightly bounded from below by the incompatibility of target observables, and is verified by the experiment employing joint measurement in which two compatible observables designed to approximate two incompatible observables on one qubit are measured simultaneously.

Experimental Observation of the Ground-State Geometric Phase of Three-Spin XY Model*

The geometric phase has become a fundamental concept in many fields of physics since it was revealed. Recently, the study of the geometric phase has attracted considerable attention in the context of quantum phase transition, where the ground state properties of the system experience a dramatic change induced by a variation of an external parameter. In this work, we experimentally measure the ground-state geometric phase of the three-spin XY model by utilizing the nuclear magnetic resonance technique. The experimental results indicate that the geometric phase could be used as a fingerprint of the ground-state quantum phase transition of many-body systems.