Skip to main content

Thank you for visiting nature.com. You are using a browser version with limited support for CSS. To obtain the best experience, we recommend you use a more up to date browser (or turn off compatibility mode in Internet Explorer). In the meantime, to ensure continued support, we are displaying the site without styles and JavaScript.

Quantum criticality

Noise gets marginal

Nature Physics volume 6, pages 721–722 (2010)Cite this article

Thermal noise destroys the fragile correlations that characterize many-body systems at a quantum critical point. Theoretical work now shows that another generic form of noise acts differently: flicker noise may alter some properties of a quantum phase transition, but it can preserve the quantum critical state.

The quantum mechanical properties of a many-body system are most clearly revealed at zero temperature, where it is in its ground state. An interesting situation occurs when there are two competing microscopic mechanisms, each of which favours a different kind of ordering pattern, such as paramagnetic versus antiferromagnetic arrangements in a spin array. Tuning the ratio of the corresponding energy scales (by applying, for example, pressure or external fields) transforms the macroscopically distinct phases into each other through a quantum phase transition1. In many cases, the two phases of matter are continuously connected. The corresponding quantum critical point is then characterized by long-range correlations in both the spatial and temporal domain. One aspect that makes such points interesting is their high degree of universality — the low-energy correlations are insensitive with respect to details of the underlying microscopic model.

This is a preview of subscription content

Access options

Buy article

Get time limited or full article access on ReadCube.

$32.00

Buy

All prices are NET prices.

Figure 1: Impact of thermal (equilibrium) and flicker 1/f (non-equilibrium) noise on a quantum critical point at the critical interaction strength gc.

References

  1. Sachdev, S. Quantum Phase Transitions (Cambridge Univ. Press, 1999).

    MATH  Google Scholar 

  2. Dalla Torre, E. G., Demler, E., Giamarchi, T. & Altman, E. Nature Phys. 10.1038/nphys1754 (2010).

  3. Winkler, K. et al. Phys. Rev. Lett. 98, 043201 (2007).

    ADS  Article  Google Scholar 

  4. Ni, K-K. et al. Science 322, 231–235 (2008).

    ADS  Article  Google Scholar 

  5. Blatt, R. & Wineland, D. J. Nature 453, 1008–1015 (2008).

    ADS  Article  Google Scholar 

  6. Diehl, S. et al. Nature Phys. 4, 878–883 (2008).

    ADS  Article  Google Scholar 

  7. Verstraete, F., Wolf, M. M. & Cirac, J. I. Nature Phys. 5, 633–636 (2009).

    ADS  Article  Google Scholar 

  8. Weimer, H., Müller, M., Lesanovsky, I., Zoller, P. & Büchler, H. P. Nature Phys. 6, 382–388 (2010).

    ADS  Article  Google Scholar 

  9. Krauter, H. et al. Preprint at http://arxiv.org/abs/1006.4344 (2010).

  10. Barreiro, J. T. et al. Preprint at http://arxiv.org/abs/1005.1965 (2010).

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Sebastian Diehl is at the Institute for Quantum Optics and Quantum Information of the Austrian Academy of Sciences, and the Institute for Theoretical Physics, University of Innsbruck, A-6020 Innsbruck, Austria. Sebastian.Diehl@uibk.ac.at,

    Sebastian Diehl

Authors
  1. Sebastian Diehl
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Rights and permissions

Reprints and Permissions

About this article

Cite this article

Diehl, S. Noise gets marginal. Nature Phys 6, 721–722 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1038/nphys1784

Download citation

  • Published:

  • Issue Date:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/nphys1784

Search

Advanced search

Quick links

Nature Briefing

Sign up for the Nature Briefing newsletter — what matters in science, free to your inbox daily.

Get the most important science stories of the day, free in your inbox. Sign up for Nature Briefing