Publications Roberto TRICARICO

2026

F. Cesa, A. Di Fini, D. A. Korbany, R. Tricarico, H. Bernien, H. Pichler, L. Piroli Engineering discrete local dynamics in globally driven dual-species atom arrays, (2026-01-23), arXiv:2601.16961 arXiv:2601.16961 (ID: 721660) Toggle Abstract
We introduce a method for engineering discrete local dynamics in globally-driven dual-species neutral atom experiments, allowing us to study emergent digital models through uniform analog controls. Leveraging the new opportunities offered by dual-species systems, such as species-alternated driving, our construction exploits simple Floquet protocols on static atom arrangements, and benefits of generalized blockade regimes (different inter- and intra-species interactions). We focus on discrete dynamical models that are special examples of Quantum Cellular Automata (QCA), and explicitly consider a number of relevant examples, including the kicked-Ising model, the Floquet Kitaev honeycomb model, and the digitization of generic translation-invariant nearest-neighbor Hamiltonians (e.g., for Trotterized evolution). As an application, we study chaotic features of discretized many-body dynamics that can be detected by leveraging only demonstrated capabilities of globally-driven experiments, and benchmark their ability to discriminate chaotic evolution.

L. Bombieri, Z. Zeng, R. Tricarico, R. Lin, S. Notarnicola, M. Cain, M. Lukin, H. Pichler Quantum adiabatic optimization with Rydberg arrays: localization phenomena and encoding strategies, PRX Quantum 6 20306 (2025-04-08), http://dx.doi.org/10.1103/PRXQuantum.6.020306 doi:10.1103/PRXQuantum.6.020306 (ID: 721280) Toggle Abstract
We study the quantum dynamics of the encoding scheme proposed in [Nguyen et al., PRX Quantum 4, 010316 (2023)], which encodes optimization problems on graphs with arbitrary connectivity into Rydberg atom arrays. Here, a graph vertex is represented by a wire of atoms, and the (crossing) crossing-with-edge gadget is placed at the intersection of two wires to (de)couple their degrees of freedom and reproduce the graph connectivity. We consider the fundamental geometry of two vertex-wires intersecting via a single gadget and look at minimum gap scaling with system size along adiabatic protocols. We find that both polynomial and exponential scaling are possible and, by means of perturbation theory, we relate the exponential closing of the minimum gap to an unfavorable localization of the ground-state wavefunction. Then, on the QuEra Aquila neutral atom machine, we observe such localization and its effect on the success probability of finding the correct solution to the encoded optimization problem. Finally, we propose possible strategies to avoid this quantum bottleneck, leading to an exponential improvement in the adiabatic performance.

C. Fromonteil, R. Tricarico, F. Cesa, H. Pichler Hamilton-Jacobi-Bellman equations for Rydberg-blockade processes, Phys. Rev. Research 6 33333 (2024-09-24), http://dx.doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevResearch.6.033333 doi:10.1103/PhysRevResearch.6.033333 (ID: 721246) Toggle Abstract
We discuss time-optimal control problems for two setups involving globally driven Rydberg atoms in the blockade limit by deriving the associated Hamilton-Jacobi-Bellman equations. From these equations, we extract the globally optimal trajectories and the corresponding controls for several target processes of the atomic system, using a generalized method of characteristics. We apply this method to retrieve known results for CZ and C-phase gates, and to find new optimal pulses for all elementary processes involved in the universal quantum computation scheme introduced in [Physical Review Letters 131, 170601 (2023)].