The Women in QST talk series aims to regularly feature inspiring female scientists from the field of Quantum Science and Technology. Outstanding female researchers are invited to talk about their research and current projects, as well as about their career paths with the QST community.

Women in QST with Xie Chen

We are excited to welcome Xie Chen from Caltech. Prof. Chen will give a talk at the MCQST Colloquium on 4 July.

During her visit at MCQST we offer a Women in QST event with her. Women from the MCQST community can discuss scientific as well as career related matters with Prof. Chen in an unformal setting during lunch on 3 July. There will also be the opportunity to get to know other participants from various QST research institutions and exchange ideas.

Quantum Circuit and the Hierarchy of Many-Body Entanglement

Entanglement in many-body quantum systems is notoriously hard to characterize due to the exponentially many parameters involved to describe the state. On the other hand, we are usually not interested in all the microscopic details of the entanglement pattern but only some of its global features. It turns out, quantum circuits of different levels of complexity provide a useful way to establish a hierarchy among many-body entanglement structures. A circuit of a finite depth generates only short range entanglement which is in the same gapped phase as an unentangled product state. A linear depth circuit on the other hand can lead to chaos beyond thermal equilibrium. In this talk, we discuss how to reach the interesting regime in between that contains nontrivial gapped orders. This is achieved using the Sequential Quantum Circuit - a circuit of linear depth but with each layer acting only on one subregion in the system. We discuss how the Sequential Quantum Circuit can be used to generate nontrivial gapped states with long range correlation or long range entanglement, perform renormalization group transformation in foliated fracton order, and create defect excitations inside the bulk of a higher dimensional topological state.

About Xie Chen

Xie Chen is a Professor of Theoretical Physics at the California Institute of Technology. Dr. Chen obtained her Ph.D. degree from MIT in 2012 and was a Miller research fellow at the University of California, Berkeley before joining Caltech in 2014. Dr. Chen is a condensed matter theorist studying emergent phenomena in strongly interacting quantum many-body systems. She received the New Horizons in Physics Prize from the Breakthrough Foundation in 2020 and was named a Simons Investigator in 2021.

Please register here for the lunch on 3 July:

If you only want to attend the talk on Tuesday, 4 July, registration is not necessary.

We use an inclusive definition of “woman” and we welcome trans women and non-binary people who are significantly female-identified.