Long-lived topological time-crystalline order on a quantum processor (2401.04333v1)
Abstract: Topologically ordered phases of matter elude Landau's symmetry-breaking theory, featuring a variety of intriguing properties such as long-range entanglement and intrinsic robustness against local perturbations. Their extension to periodically driven systems gives rise to exotic new phenomena that are forbidden in thermal equilibrium. Here, we report the observation of signatures of such a phenomenon -- a prethermal topologically ordered time crystal -- with programmable superconducting qubits arranged on a square lattice. By periodically driving the superconducting qubits with a surface-code Hamiltonian, we observe discrete time-translation symmetry breaking dynamics that is only manifested in the subharmonic temporal response of nonlocal logical operators. We further connect the observed dynamics to the underlying topological order by measuring a nonzero topological entanglement entropy and studying its subsequent dynamics. Our results demonstrate the potential to explore exotic topologically ordered nonequilibrium phases of matter with noisy intermediate-scale quantum processors.
- X.-G. Wen, Colloquium: Zoo of quantum-topological phases of matter, Rev. Mod. Phys. 89, 041004 (2017).
- T. B. Wahl, B. Han, and B. Béri, Topologically ordered time crystals, arXiv:2105.09694 (2021).
- X.-L. Qi and S.-C. Zhang, Topological insulators and superconductors, Rev. Mod. Phys. 83, 1057 (2011).
- T. Senthil, Symmetry-Protected Topological Phases of Quantum Matter, Annu. Rev. Condens. Matter Phys. 6, 299 (2015).
- K. Fujii, Topological stabilizer codes, in Quantum Computation with Topological Codes: From Qubit to Topological Fault-Tolerance (Springer Singapore, 2015) pp. 56–85.
- A. Kitaev and J. Preskill, Topological Entanglement Entropy, Phys. Rev. Lett. 96, 110404 (2006).
- I.-D. Potirniche, S. Banerjee, and E. Altman, Exploration of the stability of many-body localization in d>1𝑑1d>1italic_d > 1, Phys. Rev. B 99, 205149 (2019).
- W. De Roeck and J. Z. Imbrie, Many-body localization: Stability and instability, Philos. Trans. R. Soc. Math. Phys. Eng. Sci. 375, 20160422 (2017).
- W. Li, Z. Lu, and D.-L. Deng, Quantum Neural Network Classifiers: A Tutorial, SciPost Phys. Lect. Notes , 61 (2022).
- Z. Lu, P.-X. Shen, and D.-L. Deng, Markovian Quantum Neuroevolution for Machine Learning, Phys. Rev. Appl. 16, 044039 (2021).
- A. Kissinger and J. van de Wetering, PyZX: Large scale automated diagrammatic reasoning, Electronic Proceedings in Theoretical Computer Science 318, 229 (2020a).
- A. Kissinger and J. van de Wetering, Reducing the number of non-clifford gates in quantum circuits, Phys. Rev. A 102, 022406 (2020b).
- Qiskit contributors, Qiskit: An open-source framework for quantum computing (2023).
- Cirq Developers, Cirq (2022), See full list of authors on Github: https://github .com/quantumlib/Cirq/graphs/contributors.
Collections
Sign up for free to add this paper to one or more collections.
Paper Prompts
Sign up for free to create and run prompts on this paper using GPT-5.