Experimental Determination of <mml:math xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" display="inline"><mml:mrow><mml:mi mathvariant="script">P</mml:mi><mml:mi mathvariant="script">T</mml:mi></mml:mrow></mml:math>-Symmetric Exceptional Points in a Single Trapped Ion
Liangyu Ding, Kaiye Shi, Qiuxin Zhang, Danna Shen, Xiang Zhang, Wei Zhang
Abstract
Exceptional points (EPs) of a non-Hermitian Hamiltonian with parity-time-reversal (PT) symmetry have the potential to drastically enhance the capabilities of metrology and sensing through their power-law growing sensitivity to external perturbation. With the ability of generating and tuning dissipation in a single trapped ion system, we observe rich dynamics and detailed quantum phase transitions from the PT-symmetric phase to the symmetry-breaking phase. In this single qubit full quantum system, we develop a method to precisely determine the location of EP without any fitting parameter, and extract the eigenvalues in a unified way through all parameter regions. We can also obtain the full density matrix by quantum state tomography. Finally, we suggest from theoretical analysis that the periodically driving PT-symmetric non-Hermitian system can be used to measure the magnitude, frequency, and phase of time-dependent perturbation with EP enhancement.