What it is
How an isolated quantum system behaves after a sudden change, a quench, matters across materials science, high-energy physics and quantum chemistry, and is hard to compute, especially in more than one dimension. The authors used a programmable neutral-atom quantum simulator to explore quench dynamics in spin models with up to 180 qubits. Starting from a simple product state and quenching across a broad range of parameters, they find several stable, qualitatively distinct dynamical regimes, and trace their robustness to prethermal steady states: states that settle into an apparent equilibrium and stay there for exponentially long times before true thermalization, held up by strong dynamical constraints. They further observe sharp peaks in the response, which they explain quantitatively as the structured melting of prethermalization through resonances. In two dimensions they uncover a prethermally driven, first-order dynamical phase transition linked to the proliferation of defects in the Néel order, and probe it with a generalized Clausius-Clapeyron test. The authors present this as a programmable route to high-energy prethermal phase structure: long-lived dynamical phases, their resonant breakdown, and a first-order dynamical phase transition that is not inherited from the equilibrium phase boundaries.
Why it matters
A quantum machine mapped out long-lived dynamical phases, and the resonances that destroy them, in a regime that is hard to compute. In the preprint, the simulator is QuEra's Aquila, running rubidium-87 atoms arranged in one-dimensional chains and two-dimensional square grids, and the authors write that several of the regimes they uncover, notably in two dimensions, may not be easily accessible with existing numerical techniques.
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Filed underQuantum many-body systems, Cold Atom Physics and Bose-Einstein Condensates, Advanced Condensed Matter Physics
