A team of researchers has uncovered hidden gems lurking behind the Abelian-Higgs model in one spatial dimension and time.
The Promise of Quantum Simulators
While universal fault-tolerant quantum computing with error correction remains elusive, special-purpose quantum computers, i.e. quantum simulators, hold the future. Although the physics community strongly believes that quantum simulators have already led to quantum advantage, especially in studies of quantum dynamics and quantum disordered systems, there are no rigorous proofs yet. Moreover, most of the applications of quantum simulators have concerned models of condensed matter physics. However, this paradigm is beginning to change. Increasingly, impressive applications to quantum chemistry and optimization problems are emerging. In physics, the current focus is on quantum simulation of fundamental models of high energy physics: Lattice Gauge Theories and Quantum Field Theories.
The Higgs mechanism is an essential ingredient of the Standard Model of particle physics that explains the ‘mass generation’ of gauge bosons. While its seemingly simple one-dimensional lattice version may serve as an interesting novel quantum simulator, until now, researchers had not explored it.
New Insights from Recent Research
In a recent study published in Physical Review Letters, Titas Chanda with Jakub Zakrzewski from Jagiellonian University in Cracow, Luca Tagliacozzo from the Institute of Fundamental Physics IFF-CSIC and ICREA professor Maciej Lewenstein from ICFO took up the challenge to fill this gap. Unlike the system in the continuum, researchers identified two distinct regions in the lattice version. Specifically, they found the confined and Higgs regions. Moreover, these two regions are separated by a line of first-order phase transitions that ends in a second-order critical point. Furthermore, above this critical point, the regions are smoothly connected by a crossover. Additionally, the presence of a second-order critical point allows researchers to construct an unorthodox continuum limit of the theory described by a conformal field theory (CFT). This work strongly motivates current prospects of quantum simulations of quantum gauge theories and opens a path toward observing the Higgs mechanism in experiments with cold atomic setups.
Cited article: Titas Chanda, Maciej Lewenstein, Jakub Zakrzewski, and Luca Tagliacozzo. Phase Diagram of 1+1D Abelian-Higgs Model and Its Critical Point. Phys. Rev. Lett. 128, 090601
