The preparation of quantum many-body systems faces the difficulty that in a realistic scenario only few control parameters of the system may be accessible. In this context, an interesting connection between the energy fluctuations during state preparation and its geometric length as measured by the Fubini-Study metric was discussed in [5]. An inspiring conjecture lower bounding the energy fluctuations by the minimal geometric length of all accessible state preparation protocols was put forward together with supporting examples and numerical evidence. However, we here show that the conjecture does not hold but can be violated if the accessible parameter space has extrinsic curvature, when embedded into the space of all dynamically accessible states. We illustrate this by a number of generic qubit, qutrit and harmonic oscillator systems.

The fermionic von Neumann entropy, the fermionic entanglement entropy and the fermionic relative entropy are defined for causal fermion systems. Our definition makes use of entropy formulas for quasi-free fermionic states in terms of the reduced one-particle density operator. Our definitions are illustrated in various examples for Dirac spinors in two- and four-dimensional Minkowski space, in the Schwarzschild black hole geometry and for fermionic lattices. We review area laws for the two-dimensional diamond and a three-dimensional spatial region in Minkowski space. The connection is made to the computation of the relative entropy using modular theory.

The interaction between localized emitters and quantum fields, both in relativistic settings and in the case of ultra-strong couplings, requires non-perturbative methods beyond the rotating-wave approximation. In this work we employ chain-mapping methods to achieve a numerically exact treatment of the interaction between a localized emitter and a scalar quantum field. We extend the application range of these methods beyond emitter observables and apply them to study field observables. We first provide an overview of chain-mapping methods and their physical interpretation, and discuss the thermal double construction for systems coupled to thermal field states. Modelling the emitter as an Unruh-DeWitt particle detector, we then calculate the energy density emitted by a detector coupling strongly to the field. As a stimulating demonstration of the approach’s potential, we calculate the radiation emitted from an accelerated detector in the Unruh effect, which is closely related to the thermal double construction as we discuss. We comment on prospects and challenges of the method.

A black hole evaporates by Hawking radiation. Each mode of that radiation is thermal. If the total state is nevertheless to be pure, modes must be entangled. Estimating the minimum size of this entanglement has been an important outstanding issue. We develop a new theory of constrained random symplectic transformations, based on the assumptions that the total state is pure and Gaussian with given marginals. In the random constrained symplectic model we then compute the distribution of mode-mode correlations, from which we bound mode-mode entanglement. Modes of frequency much larger than [kBTH(t)/ħ] are not populated at time t and drop out of the analysis. Among other relatively thinly populated modes (early-time high-frequency modes and/or late modes of any frequency), we find correlations and hence entanglement to be strongly suppressed. Relatively highly populated modes (early-time low-frequency modes) can, on the other hand, be strongly correlated, but a detailed analysis reveals that they are nevertheless very unlikely to be entangled. Our analysis hence establishes that restoring unitarity after a complete evaporation of a black hole does not require any significant quantum entanglement between any pair of Hawking modes. Our analysis further gives exact general expressions for the distribution of mode-mode correlations in random, pure, Gaussian states with given marginals, which may have applications beyond black hole physics.

How much does vacuum weigh?. Vacuum is not completely empty, because Heisenberg's uncertainty principle forces vacuum fluctuations. Their existence is proven by measurements of the Casimir force. Consequently, there must also be energy in the vacuum fluctuations, which according to E = mc2 should be noticeable in the form of gravity. According to the general theory of relativity, their gravity should accelerate the expansion of the universe. However, the gravitational effect, which theoretically results from the quantum mechanically determined ground state energy of the vacuum, would be about 120 orders of magnitude too great. This contradiction is one of the fundamental, unresolved questions in physics. In the search for an answer, the Archimedes experiment is to be used as an extremely sensitive balance to determine the energy density of the vacuum. The result should provide clues to the cause of the “problem of the cosmological constant”.

An important feature of Schwarzschild spacetime is the presence of orbiting null geodesics and caustics. Their presence implies strong gravitational lensing effects for matter and radiation, i.e., for excitations of quantum fields. Here, we raise the question whether the lensing manifests itself also in the vacuum of quantum fields, namely by lensing the distribution of vacuum entanglement. To explore this possibility, we use the method of entanglement harvesting, where initially unentangled localized quantum systems are temporarily coupled to the field at different locations. We find that for the Boulware, Hartle-Hawking and Unruh vacua in 3+1-dimensional Schwarzschild spacetime, the harvesting of vacuum entanglement is indeed greatly amplified near caustics. In particular, we establish that preexisting vacuum entanglement can also be harvested for lightlike separations.

Superconducting circuits coupled to acoustic waveguides have extended the range of phenomena that can be experimentally studied using tools from quantum optics. In particular, giant artificial atoms permit the investigation of systems in which the electric dipole approximation breaks down and pronounced non-Markovian effects become important. While previous studies of giant atoms focused on the realm of the rotating-wave approximation, we go beyond this and perform a numerically exact analysis of giant atoms strongly coupled to their environment, in regimes where counter-rotating terms cannot be neglected. To achieve this, we use a Lanczos transformation to cast the field Hamiltonian into the form of a one-dimensional chain and employ matrix-product state simulations. This approach yields access to a wide range of system-bath observables and to relatively unexplored parameter regimes.

Supersymmetry (SUSY), originally proposed in particle physics, refers to a dual relation that connects fermionic and bosonic degrees of freedom in a system. Recently, there has been considerable interest in applying the idea of SUSY to topological phases, motivated by the attempt to gain insights from the fermion side into the boson side and vice versa. We present a systematic study of this construction when applied to band topology in noninteracting systems. First, on top of the conventional tenfold way, we find that topological insulators and superconductors are divided into three classes depending on whether the supercharge can be local and symmetric, must break a symmetry to preserve locality, or needs to break locality. Second, we resolve the apparent paradox between the nontriviality of free fermions and the triviality of free bosons by noting that the topological information is encoded in the identification map. We also discuss how to understand a recently revealed SUSY entanglement duality in this context. These findings are illustrated by prototypical examples. In this paper, we shed light on band topology from the perspective of SUSY.

We derive a general relation between the bosonic and fermionic entanglement in the ground states of supersymmetric quadratic Hamiltonians. For this, we construct canonical identifications between bosonic and fermionic subsystems. Our derivation relies on a unified framework to describe both bosonic and fermionic Gaussian states in terms of so-called linear complex structures J. The resulting dualities apply to the full entanglement spectrum between the bosonic and the fermionic systems, such that the von Neumann entropy and arbitrary Renyi entropies can be related. We illustrate our findings in one- and two-dimensional systems, including the paradigmatic Kitaev honeycomb model. While typically supersymmetry preserves features like area law scaling of the entanglement entropies on either side, we find a peculiar phenomenon, namely, an amplified scaling of the entanglement entropy ("super area law") in bosonic subsystems when the dual fermionic subsystems develop almost maximally entangled modes.

We study the quantum channel between two localized first-quantized systems that communicate in 3+1 dimensional Schwarzschild spacetime via a quantum field. We analyze the information carrying capacity of direct and black hole-orbiting null geodesics as well as of the timelike contributions that arise because the strong Huygens principle does not hold on the Schwarzschild background. We find, in particular, that the nondirect-null and timelike contributions, which do not possess an analog on Minkowski spacetime, can dominate over the direct null contributions. We cover the cases of both geodesic and accelerated emitters. Technically, we apply tools previously designed for the study of wave propagation in curved spacetimes to a relativistic quantum information communication setup, first for generic spacetimes, and then for the case of Schwarzschild spacetime in particular.