 Observation of topological phenomena in a programmable lattice of 1,800 qubitsAndrew D. King (),
Juan Carrasquilla,
Jack Raymond,
Isil Ozfidan,
Evgeny Andriyash,
Andrew Berkley,
Mauricio Reis,
Trevor Lanting,
Richard Harris,
Fabio Altomare,
Kelly Boothby,
Paul I. Bunyk,
Colin Enderud,
Alexandre Fréchette,
Emile Hoskinson,
Nicolas Ladizinsky,
Travis Oh,
Gabriel Poulin-Lamarre,
Christopher Rich,
Yuki Sato,
Anatoly Yu. Smirnov,
Loren J. Swenson,
Mark H. Volkmann,
Jed Whittaker,
Jason Yao,
Eric Ladizinsky,
Mark W. Johnson,
Jeremy Hilton and
Mohammad H. Amin
Nature, 2018, vol. 560, issue 7719, 456-460 Abstract: Abstract The work of Berezinskii, Kosterlitz and Thouless in the 1970s1,2 revealed exotic phases of matter governed by the topological properties of low-dimensional materials such as thin films of superfluids and superconductors. A hallmark of this phenomenon is the appearance and interaction of vortices and antivortices in an angular degree of freedom—typified by the classical XY model—owing to thermal fluctuations. In the two-dimensional Ising model this angular degree of freedom is absent in the classical case, but with the addition of a transverse field it can emerge from the interplay between frustration and quantum fluctuations. Consequently, a Kosterlitz–Thouless phase transition has been predicted in the quantum system—the two-dimensional transverse-field Ising model—by theory and simulation3–5. Here we demonstrate a large-scale quantum simulation of this phenomenon in a network of 1,800 in situ programmable superconducting niobium flux qubits whose pairwise couplings are arranged in a fully frustrated square-octagonal lattice. Essential to the critical behaviour, we observe the emergence of a complex order parameter with continuous rotational symmetry, and the onset of quasi-long-range order as the system approaches a critical temperature. We describe and use a simple approach to statistical estimation with an annealing-based quantum processor that performs Monte Carlo sampling in a chain of reverse quantum annealing protocols. Observations are consistent with classical simulations across a range of Hamiltonian parameters. We anticipate that our approach of using a quantum processor as a programmable magnetic lattice will find widespread use in the simulation and development of exotic materials. Date: 2018 Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nat:nature:v:560:y:2018:i:7719:d:10.1038_s41586-018-0410-x Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from DOI: 10.1038/s41586-018-0410-x Access Statistics for this article Nature is currently edited by Magdalena Skipper More articles in Nature from Nature |
Is your work missing from RePEc? Here is how to contribute.
Questions or problems? Check the EconPapers FAQ or send mail to .
EconPapers is hosted by the
School of Business at Örebro University.