RQS

Noncommuting conserved quantities have recently launched a subfield of quantum thermodynamics. In conventional thermodynamics, a system of interest and an environment exchange quantities—energy, particles, electric charge, etc.—that are globally conserved and are represented by Hermitian operators. These operators were implicitly assumed to commute with each other, until a few years ago. Freeing the operators to fail to commute has enabled many theoretical discoveries—about reference frames, entropy production, resource-theory models, etc.

Quantum devices hold promise to outperform classical computers in performing some physical simulations in the nearest future, making them a valuable tool for physics research. In this talk, Oles will focus on quantum simulation of the topological states of matter hosting Majorana modes -- the exotic "half-electron" states. He will show the results obtained from noisy quantum hardware provide us with accurate prediction of Majorana mode wavefunctions. This experiment also allows us to verify the topological nature of observed modes.

An interesting problem in the field of quantum error correction involves finding a physical system that hosts a "self-correcting quantum memory," defined  as an encoded qubit  coupled to an environment that naturally wants to correct errors.  To date, a quantum memory stable against finite-temperature effects is only known in four spatial dimensions or higher. Here, we take a different approach to realize a  stable  quantum memory by relying on a driven-dissipative environment.

Real-time control software and hardware is essential for operating modern quantum systems. In particular, the software plays a crucial role in bridging the gap between applications and real-time operations on the quantum system. Unfortunately, real-time control software is an often underexposed area, and many well-known software engineering techniques have not propagated to this field. As a result, control software is often hardware-specific at the cost of flexibility and portability.

Motivated by recent experimental demonstrations of Floquet topological insulators, there have been several theoretical proposals for using structured light, either spatial or spectral, to create other properties such as flat band and vortex states. In particular, the generation of vortex states in a massive Dirac fermion insulator irradiated by light carrying nonzero orbital angular momentum (OAM) has been proposed recently. Here, we evaluate the orbital magnetization and  optical conductivity as physical observables for such a system.