Organized by:
- Meng Cheng (Yale University)
- Chao-Ming Jian (Cornell University)
- Nathanan Tantivasadakarn (Caltech)
- Romain Vasseur (University of Massachusetts Amherst)
- Dominic Williamson (University of Sydney and IBM)
The central goal of quantum matter research is to discover and decipher the universal collective behavior of quantum many-body systems, captured by the notion of quantum phases. A common and powerful strategy is to organize our understanding of collective quantum behavior following the general principles of symmetry and topology. This strategy has been tremendously successful, especially for systems in equilibrium. How the notion of quantum phases of matter should be generalized out of equilibrium remains a key open question. It is timely to pursue this direction as advances in highly tunable and controllable quantum devices have brought new opportunities in realizing and probing non-equilibrium many-body systems.
Interestingly, many recent works on dynamical quantum systems coupled to noise have found emergent phenomena that require not only novel generalizations of symmetry- and topology-based concepts but also the incorporation of many-body entanglement in the analysis. One example is given by topological quantum error-correcting code states prepared on a noisy device, where the concept of topological order needs to be generalized to non-thermal mixed states. Another prominent example is given by monitored quantum circuits with exotic dynamical phases that are differentiated by how quantum information spreads across the system. In light of these examples, there are tremendous opportunities to renew and extend our fundamental understanding of the organizing principles of quantum matter in non-equilibrium settings. Additionally, this direction has the potential to uncover new schemes to exploit non-equilibrium many-body entanglement for quantum information processing and better methods for quantum simulation in NISQ platforms.
With the proposed workshop, we aim to bring together the quantum matter and quantum information communities to foster the exchange of ideas in related directions and initiate new collaborations at the Simons Center for Geometry and Physics at Stony Brook University. Specifically, the proposed workshop will focus on (1) novel quantum phases in thermal and non-thermal mixed states, (2) universal behavior in quantum many-body entanglement dynamics, and (3) dynamical protocols for quantum matter and error correction.
