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arXiv:2206.13107 · npj Quantum Information

Observation of critical phase transition in a generalized Aubry-André-Harper model with superconducting circuits

Hao Li, Yong-Yi Wang, Yun‐Hao Shi, Kaixuan Huang, Xiaohui Song, Gui-Han Liang, Zheng-Yang Mei, Bozhen Zhou, He Zhang, Jiachi Zhang, Shu Chen, S. P. Zhao, Ye Tian, Zhan-Ying Yang, Zhongcheng Xiang, Kai Xu, Dongning Zheng, Heng Fan

Published Apr 25, 2023• 63 citations
arXivHTMLPDF

Abstract

Abstract Quantum simulation enables study of many-body systems in non-equilibrium by mapping to a controllable quantum system, providing a powerful tool for computational intractable problems. Here, using a programmable quantum processor with a chain of 10 superconducting qubits interacted through tunable couplers, we simulate the one-dimensional generalized Aubry-André-Harper model for three different phases, i.e., extended, localized and critical phases. The properties of phase transitions and many-body dynamics are studied in the presence of quasi-periodic modulations for both off-diagonal hopping coefficients and on-site potentials of the model controlled respectively by adjusting strength of couplings and qubit frequencies. We observe the spin transport for initial single- and multi-excitation states in different phases, and characterize phase transitions by experimentally measuring dynamics of participation entropies. Our experimental results demonstrate that the recently developed tunable coupling architecture of superconducting processor extends greatly the simulation realms for a wide variety of Hamiltonians, and can be used to study various quantum and topological phenomena.

DOI
10.1038/s41534-023-00712-w

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We have investigated scaling properties near the quantum critical point between the extended phase and the critical phase in the Aubry-Andr\'e-Harper model with ppp-wave pairing, which have rarely been exploited as most investigations focus on the localization transition from the critical phase to the localized phase. We find that the spectrum-averaged entanglement entropy and the generalized fidelity susceptibility act as eminent universal order parameters of the corresponding critical point without gap closing. We introduce a Widom scaling Ansatz for these criticality probes to develop a unified theory of critical exponents and scaling functions. We thus extract the correlation-length critical exponent $\ensuremath{\nu}$ and the dynamical exponent zzz through the finite-size scaling given the system size increase in the Fibonacci sequence. The retrieved values of $\ensuremath{\nu}\ensuremath{\simeq}1.000$ and $z\ensuremath{\simeq}3.610$ indicate that the transition from the extended phase to the critical phase belongs to a different universality class from the localization transition. Our approach sets the stage for exploring the unconventional quantum criticality and the associated universal information of quasiperiodic systems in state-of-the-art quantum simulation experiments.
Quantum simulation of different exotic topological phases of quantum matter on a noisy intermediate-scale quantum (NISQ) processor is attracting growing interest. Here, we develop a one-dimensional 43-qubit superconducting quantum processor, named Chuang-tzu, to simulate and characterize emergent topological states. By engineering diagonal Aubry-André-Harper (AAH) models, we experimentally demonstrate the Hofstadter butterfly energy spectrum. Using Floquet engineering, we verify the existence of the topological zero modes in the commensurate off-diagonal AAH models, which have never been experimentally realized before. Remarkably, the qubit number over 40 in our quantum processor is large enough to capture the substantial topological features of a quantum system from its complex band structure, including Dirac points, the energy gap's closing, the difference between even and odd number of sites, and the distinction between edge and bulk states. Our results establish a versatile hybrid quantum simulation approach to exploring quantum topological systems in the NISQ era.
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