Engineered Open Systems and Quantum Simulations with Atoms and Ions

TL;DR

Recent advances in atomic and ion systems have enabled precise quantum control, allowing for the engineering of complex many-body Hamiltonians and Liouvillian dynamics, including open systems and non-equilibrium states.

Contribution

This review highlights recent progress in extending Hamiltonian engineering to open quantum systems using atoms and ions, emphasizing both theoretical and experimental developments.

Findings

Successful realization of digital quantum simulations in open systems

Development of methods to engineer non-equilibrium many-body states

Enhanced understanding of dissipative quantum state control

Abstract

The enormous experimental progress in atomic, molecular and optical (AMO) physics during the last decades allows us nowadays to isolate single, a few or even many-body ensembles of microscopic particles, and to manipulate their quantum properties at a level of precision, which still seemed unthinkable some years ago. This versatile set of tools has enabled the development of the well-established concept of engineering of many-body Hamiltonians in various physical platforms. These available tools, however, can also be harnessed to extend the scenario of Hamiltonian engineering to a more general Liouvillian setting, which in addition to coherent dynamics also includes controlled dissipation in many-body quantum systems. Here, we review recent theoretical and experimental progress in different directions along these lines, with a particular focus on physical realizations with systems of atoms and ions. This comprises digital quantum simulations in a general open system setting, as well as engineering and understanding new classes of systems far away from thermodynamic equilibrium.