Our work Experimental Trapped-ion Quantum Simulation of the Kibble-Zurek dynamics in momentum space was published in Scientific Reports. This was our group’s first trapped-ion experiment, following the development of the platform that began in 2013. We thank our collaborators Le Luo and Adolfo del Campo for their contributions to the experiment and theory.
Simulating a quantum phase transition
The Kibble–Zurek mechanism predicts how defects form when a system is driven through a continuous phase transition. Testing this scaling in a quantum system requires controlled state preparation, tunable dynamics and accurate measurements of the resulting excitations.
We used a single trapped ion to simulate a transverse-field Ising chain in momentum space. Each momentum mode is represented by a two-level system, allowing its excitation probability to be measured separately. Combining these measurements reconstructs the defect density of the simulated chain.
The experiment observed the predicted power-law scaling as the system crossed the quantum critical point at different rates, providing an experimental test of the Kibble–Zurek mechanism in the quantum regime.
Fig. 1. Experimental platform: the six-needle ion trap, the hyperfine levels used as a qubit, and the microwave control system that drives the simulated dynamics.
Paper link: Scientific Reports 6, 33381 (2016)