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We investigate the emergence of stable subspaces in the low-temperature quantum thermal dynamics of finite spin chains. Our analysis reveals the existence of effective decoherence-free qudit subspaces, persisting for timescales exponential in $\beta$. Surprisingly, the appearance of metastable subspaces is not directly related to the entanglement structure of the ground state(s). Rather, they arise from symmetry relations in low-lying excited states. Despite their stability within a 'phase', practical realization of stable qubits is hindered by susceptibility to symmetry-breaking perturbations. This work highlights that there can be non-trivial quantum behavior in the thermal dynamics of noncommuting many body models, and opens the door to more extensive studies of self-correction in such systems.

Topological insulators were originally discovered for electron waves in condensed matter systems. Recently this concept has been transferred to bosonic systems such as photons and phonons, which propagate in materials patterned with artificial lattices that emulate spin-Hall physics. This work has been motivated, in part, by the prospect of topologically protected transport along edge channels in on-chip circuits. Importantly, even in principle, topology protects propagation against backscattering, but not against loss, which has remained limited to the dB/cm-level for phonon waveguides, be they topological or not. Here, we combine advanced dissipation engineering, in particular the recently introduced method of soft-clamping, with the concept of a valley-Hall topological insulator for phonons. This enables on-chip phononic waveguides with propagation losses of 3 dB/km at room temperature, orders of magnitude below any previous chip-scale devices. For the first time, the low losses also allow us to accurately quantify backscattering protection in a topological phonon waveguide, using high-resolution ultrasound spectroscopy. We infer that phonons follow a sharp, 120 degree-bend with a 99.99%-probability instead of being scattered back, and less than one phonon in a million is lost. The extraordinary combination of features of this novel platform suggest applications in classical and quantum signal routing, processing, and storage., Comment: Main manuscript (16 pages, 4 figures) and supplementary information (19 pages, 10 figures)

Control of magnetization and electric polarization is attractive in relation to tailoring materials for data storage and devices such as sensors or antennae. In magnetoelectric materials, these degrees of freedom are closely coupled, allowing polarization to be controlled by a magnetic field, and magnetization by an electric field, but the magnitude of the effect remains a challenge in the case of single-phase magnetoelectrics for application. We demonstrate that the magnetoelectric properties of the mixed-anisotropy antiferromagnet LiNi$_{1-x}$Fe$_x$PO$_4$ are profoundly affected by replacing a fraction of the Ni$^{2+}$ ions with Fe$^{2+}$ on the transition metal site. This introduces random site-dependent single-ion anisotropy energies and causes a lowering of the magnetic symmetry of the system. In turn, magnetoelectric couplings that are symmetry-forbidden in the parent compounds, LiNiPO$_4$ and LiFePO$_4$, are unlocked and the dominant coupling is enhanced by two orders of magnitude. Our results demonstrate the potential of mixed-anisotropy magnets for tuning magnetoelectric properties.

This tutorial aims at giving an introductory treatment of the circuit analysis of superconducting qubits, i.e., two-level systems in superconducting circuits. It also touches upon couplings between such qubits and how microwave driving and these couplings can be used for single- and two-qubit gates, as well as how to include noise when calculating the dynamics of the system. We also discuss higher-dimensional superconducting qudits. The tutorial is intended for new researchers with limited or no experience with the field but should be accessible to anyone with a bachelor's degree in physics. The tutorial introduces the basic methods used in quantum circuit analysis, starting from a circuit diagram and ending with a quantized Hamiltonian, that may be truncated to the lowest levels. We provide examples of all the basic techniques throughout the discussion, while in the last part of the tutorial we discuss several of the most commonly used circuits for quantum-information applications. This includes both worked examples of single qubits and examples of how to analyze the coupling methods that allow multiqubit operations. In several detailed appendices, we provide the interested reader with an introduction to more advanced techniques for handling larger circuit designs., Comment: Typo corrections

Quantum mechanics dictates the band-structure of materials that is essential for functional electronic components. With increased miniaturization of devices, it becomes possible to exploit the full potential of quantum mechanics through the principles of superposition and entanglement. We propose a new class of quantum rectifiers that can leverage entanglement to dramatically increase performance by coupling two small spin chains through an effective double-slit interface. Simulations show that rectification is enhanced by several orders of magnitude even in small systems, and that the effect survives in a noisy environment. Realizable using several of the quantum technology platforms currently available, our findings reveal the importance of quantum entanglement in seemingly contradictory applications such as heat and noise control., Comment: 12 pages, 8 figures

Building a quantum computer is a daunting challenge since it requires good control but also good isolation from the environment to minimize decoherence. It is therefore important to realize quantum gates efficiently, using as few operations as possible, to reduce the amount of required control and operation time and thus improve the quantum state coherence. Here we propose a superconducting circuit for implementing a tunable system consisting of a qutrit coupled to two qubits. This system can efficiently accomplish various quantum information tasks, including generation of entanglement of the two qubits and conditional three-qubit quantum gates, such as the Toffoli and Fredkin gates. Furthermore, the system realizes a conditional geometric gate which may be used for holonomic (non-adiabatic) quantum computing. The efficiency, robustness and universality of the presented circuit makes it a promising candidate to serve as a building block for larger networks capable of performing involved quantum computational tasks., Comment: 27 pages including technical supplementary information, 9 figures, comments are most welcome

Transistors play a vital role in classical computers, and their quantum mechanical counterparts could potentially be as important in quantum computers. Where a classical transistor is operated as a switch that either blocks or allows an electric current, the quantum transistor should operate on quantum information. In terms of a spin model the in-going quantum information is an arbitrary qubit state (spin-1/2 state). In this paper, we derive a model of four qubits with Heisenberg interactions that works as a quantum spin transistor, i.e. a system with perfect state transfer or perfect blockade depending on the state of two gate qubits. When the system is initialized the dynamics complete the gate operation, hence our protocol requires minimal external control. We propose a concrete implementation of the model using state-of-the-art superconducting circuits. Finally, we demonstrate that our proposal operates with high-fidelity under realistic decoherence., Comment: 13 pages, 11 figures, comments are most welcome

We consider a one-dimensional system of particles with strong zero-range interactions. This system can be mapped onto a spin chain of the Heisenberg type with exchange coefficients that depend on the external trap. In this paper, we present an algorithm that can be used to compute these exchange coefficients. We introduce an open source code CONAN (Coefficients of One-dimensional N-Atom Networks) which is based on this algorithm. CONAN works with arbitrary external potentials and we have tested its reliability for system sizes up to around 35 particles. As illustrative examples, we consider a harmonic trap and a box trap with a superimposed asymmetric tilted potential. For these examples, the computation time typically scales with the number of particles as $O(N^{3.5 \pm 0.4})$. Computation times are around 10 seconds for $N=10$ particles and less than 10 minutes for $N=20$ particles., Comment: 16 pages, 3 figures, 4 technical appendices, revised version with updated examples and appendices. Source code and compiled versions of CONAN can be found at http://phys.au.dk/forskning/forskningsomraader/amo/few-body-physics-in-a-many-body-world/conan

We discuss the local density approximation approach to calculating the ground state energy of a one-dimensional Fermi gas containing a single impurity, and compare the results with exact numerical values that we have for up to 11 particles for general interaction strengths and up to 30 particles in the strongly interacting case. We also calculate the contact coefficient in the strongly interacting regime. The different theoretical predictions are compared to recent experimental results with few-atom systems. Firstly, we find that the local density approximation suffers from great ambiguity in the few-atom regime, yet it works surprisingly well for some models. Secondly, we find that the strong interaction theories quickly break down when the number of particles increase or the interaction strength decreases., Comment: 10 pages, 4 figures, 2 tables, final version