Probing many-body dynamics on a 51-atom quantum simulator

By Hannes Bernien, S. Schwartz, A. Keesling, H. Levine, Ahmed Omran, Hannes Pichler, Soonwon Choi, A. Zibrov, M. Endres, M. Greiner and 2 more. Nature, 2017

2,563 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Controllable, coherent many-body systems can provide insights into the fundamental properties of quantum matter, enable the realization of new quantum phases and could ultimately lead to computational systems that outperform existing computers based on classical approaches. Here we demonstrate a method for creating controlled many-body quantum matter that combines deterministically prepared, reconfigurable arrays of individually trapped cold atoms with strong, coherent interactions enabled by excitation to Rydberg states. We realize a programmable Ising-type quantum spin model with tunable interactions and system sizes of up to 51 qubits. Within this model, we observe phase transitions into spatially ordered states that break various discrete symmetries, verify the high-fidelity preparation of these states and investigate the dynamics across the phase transition in large arrays of atoms. In particular, we observe robust many-body dynamics corresponding to persistent oscillations of the order after a rapid quantum quench that results from a sudden transition across the phase boundary. Our method provides a way of exploring many-body phenomena on a programmable quantum simulator and could enable realizations of new quantum algorithms.

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

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/c5b26451b9c936d5ecf1395336c1b5fd9686c044

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Citations in the corpus

Microscopic Control and Detection of Ultracold Strontium in Optical-Tweezer Arrays (2018, background): “[18] Hannes Bernien, Sylvain Schwartz, Alexander Keesling, Harry Levine, Ahmed Omran, Hannes Pichler, Soonwon Choi, Alexander S.”
Analysis of imperfections in the coherent optical excitation of single atoms to Rydberg states (2018, methodology): “, for the quantum simulation of Ising models [2,3].”
Efficient Multiphoton Sampling of Molecular Vibronic Spectra on a Superconducting Bosonic Processor (2019, background): “A prominent example of this is the manipulation of bosonic atoms in an optical lattice to explore various types of many-body physics [2 – 4].”
Quantum computing with neutral atoms (2020, background): “In this regard, a quantum advantage has already been reached in the study of quantum magnetism [27, 47].”
Signatures of integrability in the dynamics of Rydberg-blockaded chains (2018, background): “recent quench experiments in long Rydberg-blockaded atomic chains reported a strong initial state dependence in infinite temperature thermalization times [12].”
Quantum Many-Body Scars: A Quasiparticle Perspective (2022, methodology): “(59) prepared a Néel initial state, which can be expressed in the Rydberg occupation basis as |Z2〉 = |101 .”
An Atomic-Array Optical Clock with Single-Atom Readout (2019, background): “In parallel, single-atom detection and control techniques have propelled quantum simulation and computing applications based on trapped atomic arrays; in particular, ion traps [10], optical lattices [11], and optical tweezers [12, 13].”
Probing the Quench Dynamics of Antiferromagnetic Correlations in a 2D Quantum Ising Spin System (2017, background): “These motional effects are stronger in our system compared to previous optical tweezer experiments [28,29] due to the light mass of lithium and the relatively small lattice spacing.”
Random Quantum Circuits (2022, background): “We focus here on experiments with quantum circuits, but note that these works follow many milestone papers probing fundamental aspects of quantum dynamics, thermalization and many-body localization on a wide variety of analog simulator platforms (282, 35, 285, 286, 287, 288, 289, 290).”
Quantum many-body scars and weak breaking of ergodicity (2020, methodology): “quantum simulators are quenched from |Z2〉 initial state [8].”