Garnet Kin-Lic Chan

Digital quantum matter -- realized when discrete quantum gates approximate continuous time evolution -- is susceptible to heating into chaotic, structureless states. If digitization errors are adequately suppressed, a long-lived transient regime of approximately energy-conserving dynamics can be observed on gate-based quantum computers. Conservation of energy, in turn, enables the exploration of a wide variety of complex behaviors observed in equilibrium systems, ranging from the nontrivial microscopic origins of thermalization itself to the stabilization of effective models hosting exotic emergent properties. Here, we use Quantinuum's system model H2 quantum computer to simulate digitized dynamics of the quantum Ising model, suppressing digitization errors well enough to observe thermalization on timescales that severely challenge classical simulation methods. Relaxation of an inhomogeneous state reveals an emergent hydrodynamics due to approximate energy conservation, and we compute the associated diffusion constant. By reprogramming our simulations to take place on a triangular lattice with periodic boundary conditions, we observe thermalization consistent with emergent gauge and topological constraints resulting from lattice frustration. Our results were enabled by continued advances in two-qubit gate quality (native partial entangler fidelities of $99.94(1)\%$), and establish digital quantum computers as powerful tools for studying (effectively) continuous-time dynamics.

We develop holographic quantum simulation techniques to prepare correlated electronic ground states in quantum matrix product state (qMPS) form, using far fewer qubits than the number of orbitals represented. Our approach starts with a holographic technique to prepare a compressed approximation to electronic mean-field ground-states, known as fermionic Gaussian matrix product states (GMPS), with a polynomial reduction in qubit- and (in select cases gate-) resources compared to existing techniques. Correlations are then introduced by augmenting the GMPS circuits in a variational technique which we denote GMPS+X. We demonstrate this approach on Quantinuum's System Model H1 trapped-ion quantum processor for 1$d$ models of correlated metal and Mott insulating states. Focusing on the $1d$ Fermi-Hubbard chain as a benchmark, we show that GMPS+X methods faithfully capture the physics of correlated electron states, including Mott insulators and correlated Luttinger liquid metals, using considerably fewer parameters than problem-agnostic variational circuits.