Signaled by non-analyticities in the time evolution of physical observables, dynamic quantum phase transitions (DQPTs) emerge in quench dynamics of topological systems and possess an interesting geometric origin captured by dynamic topological order parameters (DTOPs). In this work, we report the experimental study of DQPTs using discrete-time quantum walks of single photons. We simulate quench dynamics between distinct Floquet topological phases using quantum-walk dynamics, and experimentally characterize DQPTs and the underlying DTOPs through interferencebased measurements. The versatile photonic quantum-walk platform further allows us to experimentally investigate DQPTs for mixed states and in parity-time-symmetric non-unitary dynamics for the first time. Our experiment directly confirms the relation between DQPTs and DTOPs in quench dynamics of a topological system, and opens up the avenue of simulating emergent topological phenomena using discrete-time quantum-walk dynamics.

We report the experimental detection of bulk topological invariants in nonunitary discrete-time quantum walks with single photons. The nonunitarity of the quantum dynamics is enforced by periodically performing partial measurements on the polarization of the walker photon, which effectively introduces loss to the dynamics. The topological invariant of the nonunitary quantum walk is manifested in the quantized average displacement of the walker, which is probed by monitoring the photon loss. We confirm the topological properties of the system by observing localized edge states at the boundary of regions with different topological invariants. We further demonstrate the robustness of both the topological properties and the measurement scheme of the topological invariants against disorder.

We experimentally simulate non-unitary quantum dynamics using a single-photon interferometric network and study the information flow between a parity-time (PT )-symmetric non-Hermitian system and its environment. We observe oscillations of quantum-state distinguishability and complete information retrieval in the PT -symmetry-unbroken regime. We then characterize in detail critical phenomena of the information flow near the exceptional point separating the PT -unbroken andbroken regimes, and demonstrate power-law behavior in key quantities such as the distinguishability and the recurrence time. We also reveal how the critical phenomena are affected by symmetry and initial conditions. Finally, introducing an ancilla as an environment and probing quantum entanglement between the system and the environment, we confirm that the observed information retrieval is induced by a finite-dimensional entanglement partner in the environment. Our work constitutes the first experimental characterization of critical phenomena in PT -symmetric non-unitary quantum dynamics.

We show that a perfect state transfer of an arbitrary unknown two-qubit state can be achieved via a discrete-time quantum walk with various settings of coin flips and extend this method to the distribution of an arbitrary unknown multiqubit entangled state between every pair of sites in the multidimensional network. Furthermore, we study the routing of quantum information on this network in a quantum-walk architecture, which can be used as quantum information processors to communicate between separated qubits.