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Many-Body Dephasing in a Trapped-Ion Quantum Simulator
Harvey B Kaplan1, Lingzhen Guo2, Wen Lin Tan1
1Joint Quantum Institute, Department of Physics and Joint Center for Quantum Information and Computer Science, University of Maryland, College Park, Maryland 20742, USA.
Abstract:
How a closed interacting quantum many-body system relaxes and dephases as a function of time is a fundamental question in thermodynamic and statistical physics. In this Letter, we analyze and observe the persistent temporal fluctuations after a quantum quench of a tunable long-range interacting transverse-field Ising Hamiltonian realized with a trapped-ion quantum simulator. We measure the temporal fluctuations in the average magnetization of a finite-size system of spin-1/2 particles. We experiment in a regime where the properties of the system are closely related to the integrable Hamiltonian with global spin-spin coupling, which enables analytical predictions for the long-time nonintegrable dynamics. The analytical expression for the temporal fluctuations predicts the exponential suppression of temporal fluctuations with increasing system size. Our measurement data is consistent with our theory predicting the regime of many-body dephasing.
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