No Arabic abstract
Quantum simulators are a promising technology on the spectrum of quantum devices from specialized quantum experiments to universal quantum computers. These quantum devices utilize entanglement and many-particle behaviors to explore and solve hard scientific, engineering, and computational problems. Rapid development over the last two decades has produced more than 300 quantum simulators in operation worldwide using a wide variety of experimental platforms. Recent advances in several physical architectures promise a golden age of quantum simulators ranging from highly optimized special purpose simulators to flexible programmable devices. These developments have enabled a convergence of ideas drawn from fundamental physics, computer science, and device engineering. They have strong potential to address problems of societal importance, ranging from understanding vital chemical processes, to enabling the design of new materials with enhanced performance, to solving complex computational problems. It is the position of the community, as represented by participants of the NSF workshop on Programmable Quantum Simulators, that investment in a national quantum simulator program is a high priority in order to accelerate the progress in this field and to result in the first practical applications of quantum machines. Such a program should address two areas of emphasis: (1) support for creating quantum simulator prototypes usable by the broader scientific community, complementary to the present universal quantum computer effort in industry; and (2) support for fundamental research carried out by a blend of multi-investigator, multi-disciplinary collaborations with resources for quantum simulator software, hardware, and education.
Various fundamental phenomena of strongly-correlated quantum systems such as high-$T_c$ superconductivity, the fractional quantum-Hall effect, and quark confinement are still awaiting a universally accepted explanation. The main obstacle is the computational complexity of solving even the most simplified theoretical models that are designed to capture the relevant quantum correlations of the many-body system of interest. In his seminal 1982 paper [Int. J. Theor. Phys. 21, 467], Richard Feynman suggested that such models might be solved by simulation with a new type of computer whose constituent parts are effectively governed by a desired quantum many-body dynamics. Measurements on this engineered machine, now known as a quantum simulator, would reveal some unknown or difficult to compute properties of a model of interest. We argue that a useful quantum simulator must satisfy four conditions: relevance, controllability, reliability, and efficiency. We review the current state of the art of digital and analog quantum simulators. Whereas so far the majority of the focus, both theoretically and experimentally, has been on controllability of relevant models, we emphasize here the need for a careful analysis of reliability and efficiency in the presence of imperfections. We discuss how disorder and noise can impact these conditions, and illustrate our concerns with novel numerical simulations of a paradigmatic example: a disordered quantum spin chain governed by the Ising model in a transverse magnetic field. We find that disorder can decrease the reliability of an analog quantum simulator of this model, although large errors in local observables are introduced only for strong levels of disorder. We conclude that the answer to the question Can we trust quantum simulators? is... to some extent.
Quantum simulators allow to explore static and dynamical properties of otherwise intractable quantum many-body systems. In many instances, however, it is the read-out that limits such quantum simulations. In this work, we introduce a new paradigm of experimental read-out exploiting coherent non-interacting dynamics in order to extract otherwise inaccessible observables. Specifically, we present a novel tomographic recovery method allowing to indirectly measure second moments of relative density fluctuations in one-dimensional superfluids which until now eluded direct measurements. We achieve this by relating second moments of relative phase fluctuations which are measured at different evolution times through known dynamical equations arising from unitary non-interacting multi-mode dynamics. Applying methods from signal processing we reconstruct the full matrix of second moments, including the relative density fluctuations. We employ the method to investigate equilibrium states, the dynamics of phonon occupation numbers and even to predict recurrences. The method opens a new window for quantum simulations with one-dimensional superfluids, enabling a deeper analysis of their equilibration and thermalization dynamics.
Quantum computers and simulators may offer significant advantages over their classical counterparts, providing insights into quantum many-body systems and possibly improving performance for solving exponentially hard problems, such as optimization and satisfiability. Here we report the implementation of a low-depth Quantum Approximate Optimization Algorithm (QAOA) using an analog quantum simulator. We estimate the ground state energy of the Transverse Field Ising Model with long-range interactions with tunable range and we optimize the corresponding combinatorial classical problem by sampling the QAOA output with high-fidelity, single-shot individual qubit measurements. We execute the algorithm with both an exhaustive search and closed-loop optimization of the variational parameters, approximating the ground state energy with up to 40 trapped-ion qubits. We benchmark the experiment with bootstrapping heuristic methods scaling polynomially with the system size. We observe, in agreement with numerics, that the QAOA performance does not degrade significantly as we scale up the system size, and that the runtime is approximately independent from the number of qubits. We finally give a comprehensive analysis of the errors occurring in our system, a crucial step in the path forward towards the application of the QAOA to more general problem instances.
The Floquet Hamiltonian has often been used to describe a time-periodic system. Nevertheless, because the Floquet Hamiltonian depends on a micro-motion parameter, the Floquet Hamiltonian with a fixed micro-motion parameter cannot faithfully represent a driven system, which manifests as the anomalous edge states. Here we show that an accurate description of a Floquet system requires a set of Hamiltonian exhausting all values of the micro-motion parameter, and this micro-motion parameter can be viewed as an extra synthetic dimension of the system. Therefore, we show that a $d$-dimensional Floquet system can be described by a $d+1$-dimensional static Hamiltonian, and the advantage of this representation is that the periodic boundary condition is automatically imposed along the extra-dimension, which enables a straightforward definition of topological invariants. The topological invariant in the $d+1$-dimensional system can ensure a $d-1$-dimensional edge state of the $d$-dimensional Floquet system. Here we show two examples where the topological invariant is a three-dimensional Hopf invariant. We highlight that our scheme of classifying Floquet topology on the micro-motion space is different from the previous classification of Floquet topology on the time space.
Multipartite entanglement tomography, namely the quantum Fisher information (QFI) calculated with respect to different collective operators, allows to fully characterize the phase diagram of the quantum Ising chain in a transverse field with variable-range coupling. In particular, it recognizes the phase stemming from long-range antiferromagnetic coupling, a capability also shared by the spin squeezing. Furthermore, the QFI locates the quantum critical points, both with vanishing and nonvanishing mass gap. In this case, we also relate the finite-size power-law exponent of the QFI to the critical exponents of the model, finding a signal for the breakdown of conformal invariance in the deep long-range regime. Finally, the effect of a finite temperature on the multipartite entanglement, and ultimately on the phase stability, is considered. In light of the current realizations of the model with trapped ions and of the potential measurability of the QFI, our approach yields a promising strategy to probe long-range physics in controllable quantum systems.