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NON-HERMITIAN PHYSICS

Exceptional quantum behaviour

Nature Physics volume 15, pages 1214–1215 (2019)Cite this article

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Non-Hermitian systems with gain and loss give rise to exceptional points with exceptional properties. An experiment with superconducting qubits now offers a first step towards studying these singularities in the quantum domain.

Non-conservative physical systems subject to dissipation (loss) and amplification (gain) exhibit degeneracies known as exceptional points (EPs)1. As a system approaches such a point in phase space, two eigenstates merge into one, giving rise to a plethora of interesting phenomena that recently caught the attention of the physics community. Exceptional points also emerge in the quantum domain, but the practical exploration of the related physical effects is a challenging task — loss and gain, in fact, lead to noise and decoherence too. Writing in Nature Physics, Mahdi Naghiloo and colleagues have now reported an experiment that provides access to EPs in a quantum system by means of modern qubit technology and a clever measurement scheme2.

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  1. Vienna University of Technology (TU Wien), Institute for Theoretical Physics, Vienna, Austria

    Stefan Rotter

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  1. Stefan Rotter
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Correspondence to Stefan Rotter.

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Rotter, S. Exceptional quantum behaviour. Nat. Phys. 15, 1214–1215 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41567-019-0657-7

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41567-019-0657-7

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