No Arabic abstract
The Bloch oscillation (BO) and Wannier-Stark localization (WSL) are fundamental concepts about metal-insulator transitions in condensed matter physics. These phenomena have also been observed in semiconductor superlattices and simulated in platforms such as photonic waveguide arrays and cold atoms. Here, we report experimental investigation of BOs and WSL simulated with a 5-qubit programmable superconducting processor, of which the effective Hamiltonian is an isotropic $XY$ spin chain. When applying a linear potential to the system by properly tuning all individual qubits, we observe that the propagation of a single spin on the chain is suppressed. It tends to oscillate near the neighborhood of their initial positions, which demonstrates the characteristics of BOs and WSL. We verify that the WSL length is inversely correlated to the potential gradient. Benefiting from the precise single-shot simultaneous readout of all qubits in our experiments, we can also investigate the thermal transport, which requires the joint measurement of more than one qubits. The experimental results show that, as an essential characteristic for BOs and WSL, the thermal transport is also blocked under a linear potential. Our experiment would be scalable to more superconducting qubits for simulating various of out-of-equilibrium problems in quantum many-body systems.
Quantum emulators, owing to their large degree of tunability and control, allow the observation of fine aspects of closed quantum many-body systems, as either the regime where thermalization takes place or when it is halted by the presence of disorder. The latter, dubbed many-body localization (MBL) phenomenon, describes the non-ergodic behavior that is dynamically identified by the preservation of local information and slow entanglement growth. Here, we provide a precise observation of this same phenomenology in the case the onsite energy landscape is not disordered, but rather linearly varied, emulating the Stark MBL. To this end, we construct a quantum device composed of thirty-two superconducting qubits, faithfully reproducing the relaxation dynamics of a non-integrable spin model. Our results describe the real-time evolution at sizes that surpass what is currently attainable by exact simulations in classical computers, signaling the onset of quantum advantage, thus bridging the way for quantum computation as a resource for solving out-of-equilibrium many-body problems.
Thermalization is a ubiquitous process of statistical physics, in which details of few-body observables are washed out in favor of a featureless steady state. Even in isolated quantum many-body systems, limited to reversible dynamics, thermalization typically prevails. However, in these systems, there is another possibility: many-body localization (MBL) can result in preservation of a non-thermal state. While disorder has long been considered an essential ingredient for this phenomenon, recent theoretical work has suggested that a quantum many-body system with a uniformly increasing field -- but no disorder -- can also exhibit MBL, resulting in `Stark MBL. Here we realize Stark MBL in a trapped-ion quantum simulator and demonstrate its key properties: halting of thermalization and slow propagation of correlations. Tailoring the interactions between ionic spins in an effective field gradient, we directly observe their microscopic equilibration for a variety of initial states, and we apply single-site control to measure correlations between separate regions of the spin chain. Further, by engineering a varying gradient, we create a disorder-free system with coexisting long-lived thermalized and nonthermal regions. The results demonstrate the unexpected generality of MBL, with implications about the fundamental requirements for thermalization and with potential uses in engineering long-lived non-equilibrium quantum matter.
Solving finite-temperature properties of quantum many-body systems is generally challenging to classical computers due to their high computational complexities. In this article, we present experiments to demonstrate a hybrid quantum-classical simulation of thermal quantum states. By combining a classical probabilistic model and a 5-qubit programmable superconducting quantum processor, we prepare Gibbs states and excited states of Heisenberg XY and XXZ models with high fidelity and compute thermal properties including the variational free energy, energy, and entropy with a small statistical error. Our approach combines the advantage of classical probabilistic models for sampling and quantum co-processors for unitary transformations. We show that the approach is scalable in the number of qubits, and has a self-verifiable feature, revealing its potentials in solving large-scale quantum statistical mechanics problems on near-term intermediate-scale quantum computers.
We report the numerical and experimental study of elastic Wannier-Stark Ladders and Bloch Oscillations in a tunable one-dimensional granular chain consisting of cylindrical particles. The Wannier-Stark Ladders are obtained by tuning the contact angles to introduce a gradient in the contact stiffness along the granular chain. These ladders manifest as resonant modes localized in the space. When excited at the corresponding resonant frequencies, we demonstrate the existence of time-resolved Bloch Oscillations. The direct velocity measurements using Laser Doppler Vibrometry agree well with the numerical simulation results. We also show the possibility of further tailoring these Bloch Oscillations by numerical simulations. Such tunable systems could be useful for applications involving the spatial localization of elastic energy.
The required precision to perform quantum simulations beyond the capabilities of classical computers imposes major experimental and theoretical challenges. Here, we develop a characterization technique to benchmark the implementation precision of a specific quantum simulation task. We infer all parameters of the bosonic Hamiltonian that governs the dynamics of excitations in a two-dimensional grid of nearest-neighbour coupled superconducting qubits. We devise a robust algorithm for identification of Hamiltonian parameters from measured times series of the expectation values of single-mode canonical coordinates. Using super-resolution and denoising methods, we first extract eigenfrequencies of the governing Hamiltonian from the complex time domain measurement; next, we recover the eigenvectors of the Hamiltonian via constrained manifold optimization over the orthogonal group. For five and six coupled qubits, we identify Hamiltonian parameters with sub-MHz precision and construct a spatial implementation error map for a grid of 27 qubits. Our approach enables us to distinguish and quantify the effects of state preparation and measurement errors and show that they are the dominant sources of errors in the implementation. Our results quantify the implementation accuracy of analog dynamics and introduce a diagnostic toolkit for understanding, calibrating, and improving analog quantum processors.