JQI-QuICS-CMTC Lunch Seminar

Date
Fri, May 6, 2016 12:15 pm - 1:15 pm
Location
PSC 2136

Description

Speaker: Aaron Lee

Speaker Affiliation: JQI

Free lunch served at 12:00

Title: Observation of prethermalization in trapped ion quantum spin chains

Abstract: We present experimental investigations of quantum thermalization in a precisely controlled, interacting, 171Yb+ spin chain, with up to 22 ions. We quench the trapped ion spins in a quantum many-body Hamiltonian with single-atom addressing techniques and measure the long-term dynamics with single-site resolution. With a long-range transverse Ising model spin Hamiltonian, we observe emergence of an exotic prethermal phase in the quench dynamics. This non-trivial prethermal phase arises from an inhomogeneous effective potential landscape, due to a combination of the long-range interactions and the open boundary condition.