Particle transport and localization phenomena in condensed-matter systems can be modeled using a tight-binding lattice Hamiltonian.
The ideal experimental emulation of such a model utilizes simultaneous, high-fidelity control and readout of each lattice site in a highly coherent quantum system.
A team of researchers has experimentally studied quantum transport in one-dimensional and two-dimensional tight-binding lattices, emulated by a fully controllable 3 × 3 array of superconducting qubits.
They probed the propagation of entanglement throughout the lattice and extracted the degree of localization in the Anderson and Wannier-Stark regimes in the presence of site-tunable disorder strengths and gradients.
Their results are in quantitative agreement with numerical simulations and match theoretical predictions based on the tight-binding model. The demonstrated level of experimental control and accuracy in extracting the system observables of interest will enable the exploration of larger, interacting lattices where numerical simulations become intractable.
The paper has been published in npj Quantum Information.
