News

Researchers increasingly believe that a clearer understanding of information spreading is not only essential to understanding the workings of the quantum realm, where spreading  of information underlies the universal tendency toward entropy and thermal equilibrium, known in quantum systems as thermalization, but could also help engineer the internal “wiring” of quantum computers, sensors, and other devices. A QEG team has provided unprecedented visibility into the spread of information in large quantum mechanical systems, via a novel measurement methodology and metric described in a new article in Physics Review Letters. The team has been able, for the first time, to measure the spread of correlations among quantum spins in fluorapatite crystal, using an adaptation of room-temperature solid-state nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) techniques. NMR techniques can reveal the existence of correlations among spins, and thus  distinguish between different types of localization (such as many-body localization and the simpler Anderson localization).

 

Read the MIT News article.

News type: