Austrian Quantum Simulator Infrastructure granted

In the Framework of the Quantum Austria Initiative a joint project from the University of Innsbruck and the TU Wien was awarded and starts at the beginning of 2023. The “Austrian Quantum Simulator Infrastructure” project with a total funding of about 3 Million Euros will greatly enhance the already existing quantum simulators in several labs in Innsbruck and Vienna and also help in the building up of new simulators. Quantum simulators are a very powerful tool to study complex quantum systems by mimicking their behaviour with a quantum system which is fully controllable. The project consortium combines a great variety of physical systems which are used as simulators, including solid-state systems, ultracold atoms and trapped ions. Our group is participating with our long-range interacting atoms inside an optical lattice and our Rydberg tweezer array experiment.

Revealing the topological nature of the bond order wave in a strongly correlated quantum system

Now published in PRR with collaborators from ICFO, Barcelona! In the recent years, great effort has been devoted toward the study of symmetry-protected topological phases. We show that the bond order wave (BOW) induced by frustration between competing couplings has a nontrivial topological sector in the presence of chiral symmetry. We reveal its topological nature by finding a nonzero string order correlator and a degenerate entanglement spectrum, and design a realistic experimental scheme involving magnetic atoms trapped in an optical lattice. The latter paves the way towards an efficient quantum simulation of topological phases in many-body quantum systems.

The paper can be accessed here: Phys. Rev. Research, and the pre-print here: arXiv