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Left to right: Yuan Le, Xiangkai Sun, Jason Alicea, Manuel Endres, Stephen Naus, and Richard Bing-Shiun Tsai in the Endres lab at Caltech.[Credit: Caltech\/Gyohei Nomura]<\/p>\n
\t\t\t\t\tLeft to right: Yuan Le, Xiangkai Sun, Jason Alicea, Manuel Endres, Stephen Naus, and Richard Bing-Shiun Tsai in the Endres lab at Caltech.
[Credit: Caltech\/Gyohei Nomura]<\/p>\n
When different materials transition from one phase to another, such as water coming to a boil or a magnet losing its ability to attract metals, something remarkable can happen: They begin to behave identically, following the same mathematical rules. \u201cPhysicists call this trait universality\u2014the messy, microscopic details wash out and only a few essential features survive,\u201d explains\u00a0Jason Alicea<\/a>, William K. Davis Professor of Theoretical Physics. The math underlying these universal traits is commonly described by a theoretical framework called conformal field theory.<\/p>\n Reporting in the journal\u00a0Nature, a collaboration between the experimental group of Caltech\u2019s\u00a0Manuel Endres<\/a>, professor of physics, and Alicea\u2019s theory group, together with theorists at Universit\u00e9 Paris-Saclay and the Technical University of Munich, performed first-of-their-kind experiments on two different conformal field theories using quantum simulators, which are simplified versions of quantum computers tailored for specific tasks.<\/p>\n Using new technology developed for these quantum simulators, the team reports the first direct measurement of energy levels in synthetic quantum matter as predicted by the Ising and tricritical Ising conformal field theories. (Ising refers to Ernst Ising, a physicist who, in the 1920s, solved an early model of magnetism.) Both theories describe universal behavior that emerges when a quantum system\u2014exhibiting exotic traits such as\u00a0entanglement<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0superposition<\/a>\u2014is placed at a tipping point between two states, one of which is more ordered than the other.<\/p>\n Unlike transitions familiar from everyday life such as water turning into steam, this one is driven not by temperature but by quantum effects alone that happen to take place at temperatures near absolute zero. Once at that tipping point, the system can be excited by lasers to reach a series of specific energies, like the rungs of a ladder. \u201cThe energy levels predicted by these theories are important because they encode profound information about the theories themselves,\u201d Alicea says.<\/p>\n For four decades, researchers used conformal field theories to calculate the spacings between those rungs, which come in precise ratios, but nobody had measured them in an experiment until now.<\/p>\n \u201cOur new tools borrow from quantum computing platforms,\u201d says Xiangkai Sun, a co-lead author of the new study and a graduate student working in the Endres lab. \u201cOver the past 10 years, people have been learning to control these systems, and now we are at the point where we can use them to do fundamental physics research.\u201d<\/p>\n
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