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arXiv:2003.09559 · Physical Review A

Synthetic gauge field and chiral physics on two-leg superconducting circuits

Xin Guan, Yanlin Feng, Zheng‐Yuan Xue, Gang Chen, Suotang Jia

Published Sep 8, 2020• 19 citations
arXivHTMLPDF

Abstract

The gauge field is essential for exploring novel phenomena in modern physics. However, it has not been realized in the recent breakthrough experiment on two-leg superconducting circuits with transmon qubits [Y. Ye et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 123, 050502 (2019)]. Here we present an experimentally feasible method to achieve the synthetic gauge field by introducing ac microwave driving in each qubit. In particular, the effective magnetic flux per plaquette achieved can be tuned independently by properly choosing the driving phases. Moreover, the ground-state chiral currents for single- and two-qubit excitations are obtained and the Meissner-vortex phase transition is found. In the Meissner phase, the ground-state chiral current increases as the magnetic flux increases, while it decreases in the vortex phase. In addition, chiral dynamics, which depends crucially on the initial state of the system, is also revealed. Finally, the possible experimental observations of the chiral current and dynamics are addressed. Our results provide a new route to explore novel many-body properties induced by the interplay of the gauge field, two-leg hoppings, and interaction of photons on superconducting circuits.

DOI
10.1103/physreva.102.032610

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I will report on very recent experiments performed at LENS with ultracold 173Yb Fermi gases in artificial gauge fields. We have engineered Raman transitions between different 173Yb nuclear spin states to synthesize an effective lattice dynamics in a finite-sized “extra dimension”, which is encoded in the internal degree of freedom of the atoms [1]. By using this innovative approach, we have realized synthetic magnetic fields for effectively-charged fermions in ladder geometries with a variable number of legs. Direct imaging of the individual legs allowed us to demonstrate the emergence of chiral edge currents and to observe edge-cyclotron orbits propagating along the edges of the system [2], thus providing a direct evidence of a fundamental feature of quantum Hall physics in condensed-matter systems. A. Celi et al., Synthetic gauge fields in synthetic dimensions, Phys. Rev. Lett. 112, 043001 (2014). M. Mancini et al., Observation of chiral edge states with neutral fermions in a synthetic Hall ribbon, preprint arXiv:1502.02495 (2015). ∗Speaker †Corresponding author: fallani@lens.unifi.it sciencesconf.org:bec2015:67564

Bulletin of the American Physical Society•Jun 12, 2015•0 citations
The gauge field is essential for exploring novel phenomena in modern physics. However, it has not been realized in the recent breakthrough experiment on two-leg superconducting circuits with transmon qubits [Y. Ye et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 123, 050502 (2019)]. Here we present an experimentally feasible method to achieve the synthetic gauge field by introducing ac microwave driving in each qubit. In particular, the effective magnetic flux per plaquette achieved can be tuned independently by properly choosing the driving phases. Moreover, the ground-state chiral currents for single- and two-qubit excitations are obtained and the Meissner-vortex phase transition is found. In the Meissner phase, the ground-state chiral current increases as the magnetic flux increases, while it decreases in the vortex phase. In addition, chiral dynamics, which depends crucially on the initial state of the system, is also revealed. Finally, the possible experimental observations of the chiral current and dynamics are addressed. Our results provide a new route to explore novel many-body properties induced by the interplay of the gauge field, two-leg hoppings, and interaction of photons on superconducting circuits.
Many-body systems with strong interactions often exhibit macroscopic behavior markedly absent in single-particle or noninteracting limits. Such emergent phenomena are well exemplified in lattice Hubbard models, where the interplay between interactions, geometric frustration, and magnetic flux gives rise to rich physics. Superconducting qubits naturally enable analog quantum simulation of Bose-Hubbard models, while offering tunable parameters, site-resolved control, and rapid experimental repetition rates. Here, we study a superconducting-qubit device that realizes the Bose-Hubbard model on a triangular-ladder lattice. By tuning the magnitude and sign of couplings, we engineer a synthetic magnetic flux to characterize the resulting half-filling ground state for various parameter regimes. We measure observables analogous to current-current correlators and bond kinetic energies, finding signatures consistent with chiral superfluids, Meissner superfluids, and bond-ordered insulators. Our results establish superconducting circuits as a platform for robustly probing quantum phases of matter in frustrated Bose-Hubbard systems, even in strongly correlated and gapless regimes.
We investigate a square-lattice architecture of superconducting transmon qubits with interqubit interactions mediated by inductive couplers. Via periodically modulating the couplers, the Abelian gauge potential, termed effective magnetic flux, can be synthesized artificially, making the system an excellent platform for simulating two-dimensional topological physics. First, we focus on the three-leg ladder which only has three rows and investigate the chiral dynamics therein for the single-particle ground state when the effective magnetic flux varies. We find what we call the ``staggered vortex-Meissner phase transition,'' where the vortex number can typically stagger a few times between one (defined as ``vortex phase'') and larger integers (defined as ``Meissner phase'') when the effective magnetic flux changes between $\ensuremath{-}\ensuremath{\pi}$ and $\ensuremath{\pi}$. This phenomenon, actually not a phase transition by definition, is quite different from the vortex-Meissner phase transition in the two-leg ladder that, in contrast, possesses only two rows and is usually treated as the quasi-two-dimensional model. Also, we find that the chiral current relies on the effective magnetic flux according to a squeezed sinusoidal function. Both the staggering of the vortex number and squeezing of the chiral current can be controllable by the coupling ratio, which is defined by the coupling-strength ratio between the column direction and row direction. Second, we continue to increase the number of rows beyond three, and the topological band structure to be anticipated at an infinite number of rows begins to occur even for a relatively small number (10 or so for typical parameters) of rows. This heralds a small circuit scale enough to observe the topological band. The behavior of the edge state in the band gap can be interpreted by the topological Chern number, which can be calculated through integrating the Berry curvature with respect to the first Brillouin zone. Last, we present a systematic method on how to measure the topological band structure based on time- and space-domain Fourier transformation of the wave function after properly exciting the qubits, which should be helpful for comprehensively analyzing the topological physics since all the topological properties are mainly contained in the band structure. Our results offer an avenue for simulating two-dimensional topological physics on the state-of-the-art superconducting quantum chips.
Engineering artificial gauge fields in synthetic lattices offers an efficient avenue for exploring topological states in cold atomic physics and photonics in recent years. Interactions between the system constituents in synthetic dimensions become long ranged, and can induce more striking features. Here, we report the experimental observation of asymmetric chiral currents induced by interactions in a synthetic zigzag ladder with tunable staggered flux, based on the laser-driven coupling of discrete momentum states of ultracold 133Cs^{133}\mathrm{Cs}133Cs atoms. We observe that the staggered flux induces the symmetric chiral dynamics along two legs of the zigzag ladder in a noninteracting regime. However, the flux-dependent chiral currents along the two legs become asymmetric with increasing interactions, and the chiral trajectory is changed dramatically under strong interactions. Our finding opens the way for future exploration of exotic dynamics dictated by an interplay of inhomogeneous gauge fields and interactions in synthetic lattices.
Abstract Synthetic gauge fields in synthetic dimensions are now of great interest. This concept provides a convenient manner for exploring topological phases of matter. Here, we report on the first experimental realization of an atom-optically synthetic gauge field based on the synthetic momentum-state lattice of a Bose gas of 133Cs atoms, where magnetically controlled Feshbach resonance is used to tune the interacting lattice into noninteracting regime. Specifically, we engineer a noninteracting one-dimensional lattice into a two-leg ladder with tunable synthetic gauge fields. We observe the flux-dependent populations of atoms and measure the gauge field-induced chiral currents in the two legs. We also show that an inhomogeneous gauge field could control the atomic transport in the ladder. Our results lay the groundwork for using a clean noninteracting synthetic momentum-state lattice to study the gauge field-induced topological physics.
I will report on very recent experiments performed at LENS with ultracold 173Yb Fermi gases in artificial gauge fields. We have engineered Raman transitions between different 173Yb nuclear spin states to synthesize an effective lattice dynamics in a finite-sized “extra dimension”, which is encoded in the internal degree of freedom of the atoms [1]. By using this innovative approach, we have realized synthetic magnetic fields for effectively-charged fermions in ladder geometries with a variable number of legs. Direct imaging of the individual legs allowed us to demonstrate the emergence of chiral edge currents and to observe edge-cyclotron orbits propagating along the edges of the system [2], thus providing a direct evidence of a fundamental feature of quantum Hall physics in condensed-matter systems. A. Celi et al., Synthetic gauge fields in synthetic dimensions, Phys. Rev. Lett. 112, 043001 (2014). M. Mancini et al., Observation of chiral edge states with neutral fermions in a synthetic Hall ribbon, preprint arXiv:1502.02495 (2015). ∗Speaker †Corresponding author: fallani@lens.unifi.it sciencesconf.org:bec2015:67564