Condensed Matter

Dicke's seminal 1954 paper introduced the notion of `superradiance' in a system of spins coupled to a common photon mode.

Certain quantum states of the spins dominate the radiation process so that the spins radiate coherently. Dicke's original thought experiment has recently been recreated in the lab using cavity-QED setups with two spins. I will explore extending this experiment to $N$ spins and show that the radiation process naturally gives rise to entangled states. This suggests a new experimental tool to create multi-particle entanglement in the lab. In particular, a null-observation (non-observation of emitted photon) can be used to collapse the wavefunction onto a dark state. Remarkably, this dark state has resonating valence bond character. We show that the probability of collapse onto RVB state scales as $N^{-1}$, making it possible to generate entangled states of more than 20 spins.

Reference: arXiv:1609.04853

Topological states of matter are of of fundamental interest in contemporate condensed matter physics. Today, the fractional Quantum Hall effect remains the only known experimental system expected to exhibit intrinsic topological order. The question remains whether also different systems might stabilize this kind of ordering. Chiral spin liquids are an analogue of Fractional Quantum Hall Effect wave functions for spin systems. These wavefunctions have been envisioned in 1987 but only very recently several simple frustrated quantum spin models have been proposed realizing this physics. In this talk we will introduce chiral spin liquids, discuss their relation to the Fractional Quantum Hall effect and present our recent numerical studies that provide conclusive evidence for the emergence of this exotic state of matter in extended frustrated Heisenberg models. In the course of these projects novel algorithms and techniques for large scale Exact Diagonalization were developed and applied. We briefly discuss these techniques and show that they allow for sparse diagonalizations of Heisenberg systems up to 48-50 spin-1/2 particles.