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The Kibble-Zurek mechanism is the paradigm to account for the nonadiabatic dynamics of a system across a continuous phase transition. Its study in the quantum regime is hindered by the requisite of ground state cooling. We report the experimental quantum simulation of critical dynamics in the transverse-field Ising model by a set of Landau-Zener crossings in pseudo-momentum space, that can be probed with high accuracy using a single trapped ion. We test the Kibble-Zurek mechanism in the quantum regime in the momentum space and find the measured scaling of excitations is in accordance with the theoretical prediction., Comment: 10 pages, 3 figures Published in Scientific Reports, http://www.nature.com/articles/srep33381

We propose a new dark-state cooling method of trapped ion systems in the Lamb-Dicke limit. With application of microwave dressing the ion, we can obtain two electromagnetically induced transparency structures. The heating effects caused by the carrier and the blue sideband transition vanish due to the EIT effects and the final mean phonon numbers can be much less than the recoil limit. Our scheme is robust to fluctuations of microwave power and laser intensities which provides a broad cooling bandwidth to cool motional modes of a linear ion chain. Moreover, it is more suitable to cool four-level ions on a large-scale ion chip., 7 pages, 7figures

We report a state-independent experimental test of quantum contextuality of a single-photon qutrit. The experimental results demonstrate violations of an inequality originally formulated by Yu and Oh [Phys. Rev. Lett. 108, 030402 (2012)] and further optimized by Cabello et al. [Phys. Rev. A 85, 032108 (2012)]; this inequality is satisfied by all noncontextual hidden variable models and is violated by all qutrit states. Our experiment shows quantum contextuality of this nature in a most fundamental way: A way that is independent of state and unrelated to entanglement.

The study of open quantum systems is important for fundamental issues of quantum physics as well as for technological applications such as quantum information processing. Recent developments in this field have increased our basic understanding on how non-Markovian effects influence the dynamics of an open quantum system, paving the way to exploit memory effects for various quantum control tasks. Most often, the environment of an open system is thought to act as a sink for the system information. However, here we demonstrate experimentally that a photonic open system can exploit the information initially held by its environment. Correlations in the environmental degrees of freedom induce nonlocal memory effects where the bipartite open system displays, counterintuitively, local Markovian and global non-Markovian character. Our results also provide novel methods to protect and distribute entanglement, and to experimentally quantify correlations in photonic environments., V2: minor modifications