0000000000757552
AUTHOR
Ramil Nigmatullin
Assessing the progress of trapped-ion processors towards fault-tolerant quantum computation
41 pags., 32 figs., 7 tabs. -- Open Access funded by Creative Commons Atribution Licence 4.0
Observation of the Kibble-Zurek scaling law for defect formation in ion crystals
Traversal of a symmetry-breaking phase transition at finite rates can lead to causally separated regions with incompatible symmetries and the formation of defects at their boundaries, which has a crucial role in quantum and statistical mechanics, cosmology and condensed matter physics. This mechanism is conjectured to follow universal scaling laws prescribed by the Kibble-Zurek mechanism. Here we determine the scaling law for defect formation in a crystal of 16 laser-cooled trapped ions, which are conducive to the precise control of structural phases and the detection of defects. The experiment reveals an exponential scaling of defect formation γ(β), where γ is the rate of traversal of the …