When a system is driven across a quantum critical point at a constant rate its evolution must become non-adiabatic as the relaxation time τ diverges at the critical point. According to the Kibble-Zurek mechanism (KZM), the emerging post-transition excited state is characterized by a finite correlation lengthξ set at the timet =τ when the critical slowing down makes it impossible for the system to relax to the equilibrium defined by changing parameters. This observation naturally suggests a dynamical scaling similar to renormalization familiar from the equilibrium critical phenomena. We provide evidence for such KZM-inspired spatiotemporal scaling by investigating an exact solution of the transverse field quantum Ising chain in the thermodynamic limit.

The Carnot statement of the second law of thermodynamics poses an upper limit on the efficiency of all heat engines. Recently, it has been studied whether generic quantum features such as coherence and quantum entanglement could allow for quantum devices with efficiencies larger than the Carnot efficiency. The present study shows that this is not permitted by the laws of thermodynamics-independent of the model. We will show that rather the definition of heat has to be modified to account for the thermodynamic cost of maintaining non-Gibbsian equilibrium states. Our theoretical findings are illustrated for two experimentally relevant examples.

Thermodynamics is the phenomenological theory of heat and work. Here we analyze to what extent quantum thermodynamic relations are immune to the underlying mathematical formulation of quantum mechanics. As a main result, we show that the Jarzynski equality holds true for all non-hermitian quantum systems with real spectrum. This equality expresses the second law of thermodynamics for isothermal processes arbitrarily far from equilibrium. In the quasistatic limit however, the second law leads to the Carnot bound which is fulfilled even if some eigenenergies are complex provided they appear in conjugate pairs. Furthermore, we propose two setups to test our predictions, namely with strongly interacting excitons and photons in a semiconductor microcavity and in the non-hermitian tight-binding model.

The shift of interest from general purpose quantum computers to adiabatic quantum computing or quantum annealing calls for a broadly applicable and easy to implement test to assess how quantum or adiabatic is a specific hardware. Here we propose such a test based on an exactly solvable many body system–the quantum Ising chain in transverse field–and implement it on the D-Wave machine. An ideal adiabatic quench of the quantum Ising chain should lead to an ordered broken symmetry ground state with all spins aligned in the same direction. An actual quench can be imperfect due to decoherence, noise, flaws in the implemented Hamiltonian, or simply too fast to be adiabatic. Imperfections result in topological defects: Spins change orientation, kinks punctuating ordered sections of the chain. The number of such defects quantifies the extent by which the quantum computer misses the ground state, and is, therefore, imperfect.

Near term quantum hardware promises unprecedented computational advantage. Crucial in its development is the characterization and minimization of computational errors. We propose the use of the quantum fluctuation theorem to benchmark the accuracy of quantum annealers. This versatile tool provides simple means to determine whether the quantum dynamics are unital, unitary, and adiabatic, or whether the system is prone to thermal noise. Our proposal is experimentally tested on two generations of the D-Wave machine, which illustrates the sensitivity of the fluctuation theorem to the smallest aberrations from ideal annealing. In addition, for the optimally operating D-Wave machine, our experiment provides the first experimental verification of the integral fluctuation in an interacting, many-body quantum system.

Obtaining a thermodynamically accurate phase diagram through numerical calculations is a computationally expensive problem that is crucially important to understanding the complex phenomena of solid state physics, such as superconductivity. In this work we show how this type of analysis can be significantly accelerated through the use of modern GPUs. We illustrate this with a concrete example of free energy calculation in multi-band iron-based superconductors, known to exhibit a superconducting state with oscillating order parameter (OP). Our approach can also be used for classical BCS-type superconductors. With a customized algorithm and compiler tuning we are able to achieve a 19x speedup compared to the CPU (119x compared to a single CPU core), reducing calculation time from minutes to mere seconds, enabling the analysis of larger systems and the elimination of finite size effects.Keywords: FFLO, pnictides, NVIDIA CUDA, PGI CUDA Fortran, superconductivity PROGRAM SUMMARYManuscript Title: GPU-based acceleration of free energy calculations in solid state physics Authors: Micha l Januszewski, Andrzej Ptok, Dawid Crivelli, Bart lomiej Gardas Journal Reference: Catalogue identifier: Licensing provisions: LGPLv3 Programming language: Fortran, CUDA C Computer: any with a CUDA-compliant GPU Operating system: no limits (tested on Linux) RAM: Typically tens of megabytes. Keywords: superconductivity, FFLO, CUDA, OpenMP, OpenACC, free energy Classification: 7, 6.5 Nature of problem: GPU-accelerated free energy calculations in multi-band iron-based Email addresses: michalj@gmail.com (Micha l Januszewski), aptok@mmj.pl (Andrzej Ptok) February 4, 2015 superconductor models. Solution method: Parallel parameter space search for a global minimum of free energy. Preprint submitted to Computer Physics Communications Unusual features:The same core algorithm is implemented in Fortran with OpenMP and OpenACC compiler annotations, as well as in CUDA C. The original Fortran implementation targets the CPU architecture, while the CUDA C version is hand-optimized for modern GPUs.Running time: problem-dependent, up to several seconds for a single value of momentum and a linear lattice size on the order of 10 3 .

The ground state of the one-dimensional Bose-Hubbard model at unit filling undergoes the Mottsuperfluid quantum phase transition. It belongs to the Kosterlitz-Thouless universality class with an exponential divergence of the correlation length in place of the usual power law. We present numerical simulations of a linear quench both from the Mott insulator to superfluid and back. The results satisfy the scaling hypothesis that follows from the Kibble-Zurek mechanism (KZM). In the superfluid-to-Mott quenches there is no significant excitation in the superfluid phase despite its gaplessness. Since all critical superfluid ground states are qualitatively similar, the excitation begins to build up only after crossing the critical point when the ground state begins to change fundamentally. The last process falls into the KZM framework.

It is recognized that, apart from the total energy conservation, there is a nonlocal and a somewhat hidden symmetry in this model. Conditions for the existence of this observable, its form and its explicit construction are presented.