Teaching

This lecture course offers an introduction to quantum many-body dynamics, emphasizing recent exciting and fundamental developments in this rapidly developing field, and includes a 'hands-on' research component. Quantum many-body dynamics combines aspects from condensed matter physics and quantum optics, based on a rich interplay between theoretical developments and experimental advances in quantum computing and quantum simulators. This course covers the foundations of this field, introducing aspects of quantum chaos and quantum quench dynamics, before moving on to topics of recent interest including many-body localization, prethermalization, periodically driven (Floquet) systems and Floquet engineering, discrete time crystals, and quantum circuits as minimal models for many-body dynamics.

Master students will have the opportunity to gain first-hand research experience by doing a small project and presenting their results. These projects are supervised by the lecturers and will serve as an introduction to recent developments, consisting of a reproduction part and original research. The final month of lectures will consist of presentations of these student projects, as well as lectures by guest lecturers (depending on the number of student presentations).
 

Prerequisites: Quantum Mechanics, Statistical Mechanics, basic familiarity with Python

Preliminary reading materials:

• J. J. Sakurai, Modern Quantum Mechanics, Chapters 1-4 and Chapter 7;
• basic notions of statistical mechanics and thermodynamics;
• Chris Laumann's Scientific Computing in Python lectures given at ICTP: lecture 1, lecture 2, lecture 3, notebooks.
   

ECTS Credits: 5 ECTS

Coursework: The course offers regular lectures (see table below for syllabus). Since this is an advanced course, there will be no weekly problem sets and no discussion/tutorial sessions. Besides attending lectures (at least 75% of lectures), students will choose a small research project to work out during the semester, and present their results in class in January. Example project topics are listed below, but students are free to choose their own topic, provided this topic is approved by one of the instructors. These projects are restricted to master students only, PhD students following the course are only expected to attend the lectures.
 

Final Exam: Oral exam starting with the student's research project, and going into related topics covered in class. Only for students taking the course for credit.

Time and Place:

Tue/Thu: 13:00 - 14:30
Venue: Seminar Room 1-3 (SR1-3), Max Planck Institute for the Physics of Complex Systems, Noethnitzer Str 38, Dresden 01187 
Public holidays: Oct 31, Dec 21, Dec 26, Dec 28, Jan 2

Deadline to choose project: Nov 16

Lecturers:

Marin Bukov, PhD
Pieter Claeys, PhD
Prof. Dr. Roderich Moessner

Possible student projects:

• Driving the transverse-field Ising model
• Quantum many-body scars using QuSpin
• Prethermalization in random multipolar driven systems
• Operator spreading in classical and quantum dynamics
• Eigenstate thermalization in Floquet dynamics
• Discrete time crystals on quantum computers using qiskit
• Counterdiabatic control in classical and quantum two-spin systems
• Classical fractional discrete time crystals

Syllabus: