Experimental tests of Lieb-Robinson bounds

Abstract

Judging by the enormous body of work that it has inspired, Elliott Lieb and Derek Robinson's 1972 article on the "Finite Group Velocity of Quantum Spin Systems" can be regarded as a \emph{high-impact paper}, as research accountants say. But for more than 30 years this major contribution to quantum physics has remained pretty much confidential. Lieb and Robinson's work eventually found a large audience in the years 2000, with the rapid and concomitant development of quantum information theory and experimental platforms enabling the characterisation and manipulation of isolated quantum systems at the single-particle level. In this short review article, I will first remind the reader of the central result of Lieb and Robinson's work, namely the existence of a maximum group velocity for the propagation of information in non-relativistic quantum systems. I will then review the experiments that most closely relate to this finding, in the sense that they reveal how information propagates in specific -- yet "real" -- quantum systems. Finally, as an outlook, I will attempt to make a connection with the quantum version of the butterfly effect recently studied in chaotic quantum systems.

14 pages, 4 figures

References in corpus (6)

• Lieb-Robinson bounds and the generation of correlations and topological quantum order
• Exact relaxation in a class of non-equilibrium quantum lattice systems
• Spreading of correlations and entanglement after a quench in the one-dimensional Bose-Hubbard model
• Propagation of Correlations in Quantum Lattice Systems
• Many-body localisation implies that eigenvectors are matrix-product states
• Twofold correlation spreading in a strongly correlated lattice Bose gas