December 21, 2024

Quantum simulation of dynamical phase transitions

Researchers from the Institute of Physics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Zhejiang University and RIKEN in Japan, has successfully performed quantum simulation of Dynamical Phase Transitions (DPT) in a Lipkin-Meshkov-Glick model with a 16-qubit superconducting quantum simulator.

Dynamical phase transition is a kind of nonequilibrium phase transition and has been theoretically investigated in various quantum many-body models. There are two types of DPT. The first type (DPT-1) focuses on the non-equilibrium order parameter, while the second type (DPT-2) is characterized by the non-analytical behaviors of Loschmidt echo associated with the Lee-Yang-Fisher zeros in statistical mechanics.

The quantum processor integrates 20 superconducting qubits, all coupled to a common resonator bus, which was used to generate Schrödinger cat states in previous work. This time, 16 qubits were used to engineer the Lipkin-Meshkov-Glick (LMG) model by applying controllable transverse field to each qubit. The system is driven into a non-equilibrium state with microwaves and then evolved under the LMG model.

This study has been published in Science Advances.

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