Disorder-assisted assembly of strongly correlated fluids of light.

Guiding many-body systems to desired states is a central challenge of modern quantum science, with applications from quantum computation1,2 to many-body physics3 and quantum-enhanced metrology4. Approaches to solving this problem include step-by-step assembly5,6, reservoir engineering to irreversibly pump towards a target state7,8 and adiabatic evolution from a known initial state9,10. Here we construct low-entropy quantum fluids of light in a Bose-Hubbard circuit by combining particle-by-particle assembly and adiabatic preparation. We inject individual photons into a disordered lattice for which the eigenstates are known and localized, then adiabatically remove this disorder, enabling quantum fluctuations to melt the photons into a fluid. Using our platform11, we first benchmark this lattice melting technique by building and characterizing arbitrary single-particle-in-a-box states, then assemble multiparticle strongly correlated fluids. Intersite entanglement measurements performed through single-site tomography indicate that the particles in the fluid delocalize, whereas two-body density correlation measurements demonstrate that they also avoid one another, revealing Friedel oscillations characteristic of a Tonks-Girardeau gas12,13. This work opens new possibilities for the preparation of topological and otherwise exotic phases of synthetic matter3,14,15.

Emergence and persistence of flow inhomogeneities in the yielding and fluidization of dense soft solids.

In three-dimensional computer simulations of model non-Brownian jammed suspensions, we compute the time required to reach homogeneous flow upon yielding, by analyzing stresses and particle packing at different shear rates, with and without confinement. We show that the stress overshoot and persistent shear banding preceding the complete fluidization are controlled by the presence of overconstrained microscopic domains in the initial solids. Such domains, identifiable with icosahedrally packed regions in the model used, allow for stress accumulation during the shear startup. Their structural reorganization under deformation controls the emergence and the persistence of the shear banding.