Source: School of Physics and Astronomy
Written by: School of Physics and Astronomy
Edited by: Wang Dongmei

Most recently, Professor Le Luo’s group, from the School of Physics and Astronomy at Sun Yat-sen University published their result in Nature Communications as “Observation of parity-time symmetry breaking transitions in a dissipative Floquet system of ultracold atoms”. This paper reports the first quantum simulation of non-Hermitian parity - time symmetric quantum mechanics using an ultra-cold atomic gas (Nature Communications, 10:855, 2019). Prof. Le Luo and Prof. Yogesh N Joglekar, from Purdue University-Indiana University Indianapolis, are co-corresponding authors. Dr. Jiaming Li, a research fellow from the school of Physics and Astronomy, is the paper's first author.

Previously, experimental studies of non-Hermitian parity-time symmetry quantum mechanics only observed the parity-time phase transitions with static dissipations. Prof. Le Luo’s group first developed ultracold atomic gases as a versatile quantum simulator for parity-time symmetry quantum mechanics. Benefiting from highly tunable control parameters and precision measurement tools with ultracold atoms experiments, they successfully observed Floquet parity-time symmetry breaking phase transitions in an ultracold Femi gas with only 500 nK above the absolute zero, which is the first experiment demonstration of the Floquet parity-time quantum mechanics. Furthermore, they explored the multiphoton parity-time transitions, and the results are in very good agreement with the theoretical predictions.

This research opens a new frontier for quantum simulation and precision measurement based on non-Hermitian open quantum systems, targeting on new discoveries, such as non-Hermitian topological sates and ultra-sensitive spectral response of open quantum systems, in the future.

Link to the paper: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-019-08596-1