Holger Fehske

Long-lived spin-helix states facilitate the study of nonequilibrium dynamics in quantum magnets. We consider the decay of transverse spin helices in antiferromagnetic spin- S XXZ chains with single-ion anisostropy. The spin-helix decay is observable in the time evolution of the local magnetization that we calculate numerically for the system in the thermodynamic limit using infinite time-evolving block decimation simulations. Although the single-ion anisotropy prevents helix states from being eigenstates of the Hamiltonian, they still can be long-lived for appropriately chosen wave numbers. In the case of easy-axis exchange anisotropy, the single-ion anisotropy may even stabilize the helices. Within a spin-wave approximation, we obtain a condition giving an estimate for the most stable wave number Q that agrees qualitatively with our numerical results.

Cross-talk between qubits is one of the main challenges for scaling superconducting quantum processors. Here, we use the density-matrix renormalization group to numerically analyze lattices of superconducting qubits from a perspective of many-body localization. Specifically, we compare different architectures that include tunable couplers designed to decouple qubits in the idle state, and calculate the residual ZZ interactions as well as the inverse participation ratio in the computational basis states. For transmon qubits outside of the straddling regime, the results confirm that tunable C-shunt flux couplers are significantly more efficient in mitigating the ZZ interactions than tunable transmons. A recently proposed fluxonium architecture with tunable transmon couplers is demonstrated to also maintain its strong suppression of the ZZ interactions in larger systems, while having a higher inverse participation ratio in the computational basis states than lattices of transmon qubits. Our results thus suggest that fluxonium architectures may feature lower cross talk than transmon lattices when designed to achieve similar gate speeds and fidelities.

Employing a largely unbiased variational exact diagonalization technique, we analyze the consequences of longer-ranged electron hopping and electron-phonon interaction on polaron formation in one dimension. Having at our disposal the accurate ground state energy and wavefunction, we calculate and discuss various physical quantities, such as the renormalized band structure, effective mass, wave-function renormalization factor, phonon dressing and Drude weight, characterizing the properties of the polaronic quasiparticle. We demonstrate that the electron-phonon coupling affects the relative strength of the nearest-neigbor (NN) and next-nearest-neigbor (NNN) hopping processes in a dynamic way. Most notably we observe that the minimum of the polaron band, occurring at a finite momentum for large negative ratio between NN and NNN transfer, jumps to zero momentum as the electron-phonon coupling exceeds a critical one, thereby causing a rather sharp polaron transition in the one-dimensional extended Holstein model. The signatures of this transition are seen in the effective mass and polaron mobility, and therefore should be easily detectable by transport measurements.

We generalize the two-channel (Edwards) fermion-boson model describing quantum transport in a background medium to the more realistic case of dispersive bosons. Using the variational exact diagonalization technique, we numerically solve the extended model in a one-dimensional setting, for both downward and upward curved boson dispersion, and show that going away from the previous Einstein-boson assumption has profound consequences for the particle transport. Specifically, we analyze the ground-state and spectral properties and demonstrate the renormalization of the particle's coherent band, effective mass, photoemission spectra and fermion-boson correlation functions due to the interplay of fluctuations and correlations in a dispersive environment.

We generalize the two-channel (Edwards) fermion-boson model describing quantum transport in a background medium to the more realistic case of dispersive bosons. Using the variational exact diagonalization technique, we numerically solve the extended model in a one-dimensional setting, for both downward and upward curved boson dispersion, and show that going away from the previous Einstein-boson assumption has profound consequences for the particle transport. Specifically, we analyze the ground-state and spectral properties and demonstrate the renormalization of the particle's coherent band, effective mass, photoemission spectra, and fermion-boson correlation functions due to the interplay of fluctuations and correlations in a dispersive environment.

Employing a largely unbiased variational exact diagonalization technique, we analyze the consequences of longer-ranged electron hopping and electron-phonon interaction on polaron formation in one dimension. Having at our disposal the accurate ground-state energy and wave function, we calculate and discuss various physical quantities, such as the renormalized band structure, effective mass, wave-function renormalization factor, phonon dressing, and Drude weight, characterizing the properties of the polaronic quasiparticle. We demonstrate that the electron-phonon coupling affects the relative strength of the nearest neighbor (NN) and next nearest neighbor (NNN) hopping processes in a dynamic way. Most notably we observe that the minimum of the polaron band, occurring at a finite momentum for large negative ratio between NN and NNN transfer, jumps to zero momentum as the electron-phonon coupling exceeds a critical one, thereby causing a rather sharp polaron transition in the one-dimensional extended Holstein model. The signatures of this transition are seen in the effective mass and polaron mobility, and therefore should be easily detectable by transport measurements.

We address the communication overhead of distributed sparse matrix-(multiple)-vector multiplication in the context of large-scale eigensolvers, using filter diagonalization as an example. The basis of our study is a performance model, which includes a communication metric that is computed directly from the matrix sparsity pattern without running any code. The performance model quantifies to which extent scalability and parallel efficiency are lost due to communication overhead. To restore scalability, we identify two orthogonal layers of parallelism in the filter diagonalization technique. In the horizontal layer the rows of the sparse matrix are distributed across individual processes. In the vertical layer bundles of multiple vectors are distributed across separate process groups. An analysis in terms of the communication metric predicts that scalability can be restored if, and only if, one implements the two orthogonal layers of parallelism via different distributed vector layouts. Our theoretical analysis is corroborated by benchmarks for application matrices from quantum and solid state physics, road networks, and nonlinear programming. We finally demonstrate the benefits of using orthogonal layers of parallelism with two exemplary application cases—an exciton and a strongly correlated electron system—which incur either small or large communication overhead.