The Quantum Shorts festival celebrates independent short films inspired by quantum mechanics. Using ideas like the uncertainty principle and many-worlds interpretation, filmmakers from around the world have created five-minute wonders.
Join us for Quantum Today, where we sit down with researchers from the University of Waterloo’s Institute for Quantum Computing (IQC) to talk about their work, its impact and where their research may lead.
Abstract: Strange metals have linear-in-temperature (T-linear) down to low temperature. Strange metals are found in many families of correlated electron materials, leading to the conjecture that a universal bound - the "Planckian" bound - limits the scattering rate of electrons to a value set by fundamental constants. If the Planckian bound exists, it would provide a natural explanation for why a host of seemingly disparate systems, including high-temperature superconductors and twisted bilayer graphene, all have T-linear resistivity. Perhaps more dramatically, T-linear resistivity suggests that electron-electron interactions are so strong that conventional concepts such as quasiparticles and Boltzmann transport do not apply in strange metals. I will present our work on the cuprate Nd-LSCO and the 5-layer superconducting nickelate that shows that conventional quasiparticle transport is alive and well, even in the strange metal regime where the Planckian bound is saturated. This suggests that we may not need to abandon the quasiparticle picture entirely, but that we need to better understand the source of scattering in these materials.
Abstract:
Landau-Zener tunneling, which describes the transitions in a two-level system during the passage through an anti-crossing, is a model applicable to a wide range of physical phenomena. Dissipation due to coupling between the system and the environment is an important factor in determining the transition rates. Using a superconducting tunable capacitively shunted flux qubit, we observe the crossover from weak to strong coupling to the environment. The weak coupling limit corresponds to small system-environment coupling and leads to environment-induced thermalization. In the strong coupling limit, environmental polarizations dress the system and transitions occur between the dressed states. Our results confirm previous theoretical studies of dissipative Landau-Zener tunneling in the weak and strong coupling limits, and motivate further work on understanding the intermediate regime. This work is relevant for understanding the role of open system effects in quantum annealing, where Landau-Zener transitions at small gaps, occurring in large scale systems, are important to understand for improving the success probability.
This talk is based on the preprint arXiv:2207.02017.
Abstract: In recent years, we have witnessed remarkable experimental breakthroughs in uncovering the intriguing properties of correlated metals in the vicinity of Mott transitions. Describing these phenomena theoretically remains an open challenge. This talk will focus on three recent examples of puzzling electronic behavior near Mott insulating phases and address the various conundrums. In the first part of the talk, I will discuss the microscopic origin of an unconventional T-linear resistivity with Planckian scattering in a quasi-two-dimensional “good” metal with long mean-free path, consisting of highly conducting metallic and Mott insulating layers, respectively. In the second part, I will address the origin of a low-temperature “bad” metallic behavior in the vicinity of a continuous bandwidth-tuned metal-insulator transition in a moiré semiconductor. I will end by presenting some new theoretical insights into the experimental observation of an anomalous particle-hole continuum and overdamped plasmon in the density response of cuprate “strange” metals.
Quantum mechanics helps us understand what happens below what a microscope can see, describing the world of atoms, electrons, photons, and more. In celebration of World Quantum Day on April 14th, Dr. John Donohue from the Institute for Quantum Computing will sit down with Exploring by the Seat of Your Pants to explore quantum science and its applications, from light particles and electron waves to superconductors and quantum computers.
Development of InSb Surface Quantum Wells for hybrid superconducting device applications.
Abstract: Surface quantum well (QW) heterostructures in III-V semiconductors are compatible with proximitized superconductivity and offer a scalable planar platform for superconductor-semiconductor systems, such as those suggested for topological quantum computation and those suitable for topological phase transitions involving Majorana zero modes. Amongst III-V binary semiconductors, Indium Antimonide (InSb) has the smallest electron effective mass, highest spin orbit coupling and largest Land´e g-factor. Such material properties makes the pursuit of InSb QWs desirable for a number of quantum device applications, including quantum sensing, quantum metrology, and quantum computing.
Unfortunately, high quality two-dimensional electron gases (2DEGs) in InSb QWs have so far been difficult to realize. InSb QWs have generally relied on the use of modulation doping for 2DEG formation, but these structures have frequently reported issues with parasitic parallel conduction and unstable carrier densities. We report on the transport characteristics of field effect 2DEGs in surface InSb quantum wells which overcome these challenges and are suitable for future hybrid superconducting device applications.
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