Quantum gas microscopy of Kardar-Parisi-Zhang superdiffusion

David Wei, Antonio Rubio-Abadal, Bingtian Ye, Francisco Machado, Jack Kemp, Kritsana Srakaew, Simon Hollerith, Jun Rui, Sarang Gopalakrishnan, Norman Y. Yao, Immanuel Bloch, Johannes Zeiher
Science (2022)
arXiv:2107.00038

Abstract

The Kardar-Parisi-Zhang (KPZ) universality class describes the coarse-grained behavior of a wealth of classical stochastic models. Surprisingly, it was recently conjectured to also describe spin transport in the one-dimensional quantum Heisenberg model. We test this conjecture by experimentally probing transport in a cold-atom quantum simulator via the relaxation of domain walls in spin chains of up to 50 spins. We find that domain-wall relaxation is indeed governed by the KPZ dynamical exponent \(z=3/2\), and that the occurrence of KPZ scaling requires both integrability and a non-abelian SU(2) symmetry. Finally, we leverage the single-spin-sensitive detection enabled by the quantum-gas microscope to measure a novel observable based on spin-transport statistics, which yields a clear signature of the non-linearity that is a hallmark of KPZ universality.