Observation of a many-body dynamical phase transition with a 53-qubit quantum simulator

By J. Zhang, G. Pagano, P. Hess, A. Kyprianidis, H. Kaplan, Alexey V. Gorshkov, Zhexuan Gong, Christopher R. Monroe. Nature, 2017

1,099 citations recorded by the source corpus.

A quantum simulator is a type of quantum computer that controls the interactions between quantum bits (or qubits) in a way that can be mapped to certain quantum many-body problems. As it becomes possible to exert more control over larger numbers of qubits, such simulators will be able to tackle a wider range of problems, such as materials design and molecular modelling, with the ultimate limit being a universal quantum computer that can solve general classes of hard problems. Here we use a quantum simulator composed of up to 53 qubits to study non-equilibrium dynamics in the transverse-field Ising model with long-range interactions. We observe a dynamical phase transition after a sudden change of the Hamiltonian, in a regime in which conventional statistical mechanics does not apply. The qubits are represented by the spins of trapped ions, which can be prepared in various initial pure states. We apply a global long-range Ising interaction with controllable strength and range, and measure each individual qubit with an efficiency of nearly 99 per cent. Such high efficiency means that arbitrary many-body correlations between qubits can be measured in a single shot, enabling the dynamical phase transition to be probed directly and revealing computationally intractable features that rely on the long-range interactions and high connectivity between qubits.

Subfields: Artificial Intelligence, Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/c0a03980f716165b71587b2e20a02af7e17abe69

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Citations in the corpus

Benchmarking an 11-qubit quantum computer (2019, methodology): “[19, 20] Algorithms have been executed on up to seven trapped-ion qubits[22] and, while not optimized for universal quantum computing, quantum simulators with more than 50 ions have modeled fundamental quantum systems including Ising chains[23] and quantum magnetism.”
Practical quantum advantage in quantum simulation (2022, background): “30,31 ), to systems with topological properties 32,33 , and dynamics in spin systems with both short-range 34,35 and long-range 36–38 interactions.”
Toward the first quantum simulation with quantum speedup (2017, background): “Note that analog quantum simulation (4, 5) is another promising approach to simulating spin systems that may be easier to realize in the short term.”