CQuIC Seminars
Many-Body Physics in the NISQ Era: Quantum Programming a Discrete Time Crystal
Presented by Vedika Khemani (Stanford)
A confluence of developments across a range of subfields --- particularly experimental advances in building Noisy Intermediate-Scale Quantum (NISQ) devices --- have opened up a vast new territory of studying many-body phenomena in completely novel regimes: highly excited, "post Hamiltonian", and far from equilibrium. NISQ devices, while still far from achieving fault-tolerant quantum computation, are exceptional laboratory systems, with large many-body Hilbert spaces and unprecedented capabilities for control and measurement. This allows the exploration of quantum dynamics in new regimes, particularly out of equilibrium, and motivates new paradigms of phase structure. I will argue that probing nonequilibrium phases in time-periodic (Floquet) circuits are a particularly good fit for NISQ capabilities in the near term. Focusing on the paradigmatic example of the "discrete time crystal" (DTC), I will review the idea of eigenstate order, wherein many-body localization allows the definition of phase structure away from thermal equilibrium. I will then discuss how an eigenstate-ordered DTC can be studied on NISQ hardware [1], and present recent experimental work in which these ideas are implemented on Google Quantum AI's superconducting qubit processor [2], giving a scalable blueprint for NISQ-era studies of non equilibrium phases of matter.
[1] M. Ippoliti, K. Kechedzhi, R. Moessner, S. Sondhi, V. Khemani, PRX Quantum 2, 030346 (2021)
[2] X. Mi, MI, C. Quintana, A. Greene et al. V. Khemani, P Roushan, (Google Quantum AI and collaborators), Nature (2021)
3:30 pm, Thursday, December 9, 2021
Zoom,
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