2018/06/28 by Kunkun Wang, Xingze Qiu, Lei Xiao +4 · 2 citations
Physics and Astronomy · #quant-ph #cond-mat.stat-mech
paper · pdf · doi:10.1103/physrevlett.122.020501
published as Phys. Rev. Lett. 122, 020501 (2019) · 13 pages, 8 figures
arxiv created 2018/06/28 · arxiv updated 2019/01/23
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 interference-based 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.