John Gaebler

We present a method for achieving high fidelity state preparation and measurement (SPAM) using trapped ion hyperfine qubits with nuclear spins higher than $I = 1/2$. The ground states of these higher nuclear spin isotopes do not afford a simple frequency-selective state preparation scheme. We circumvent this limitation by stroboscopically driving strong and weak transitions, blending fast optical pumping using dipole transitions and narrow microwave or optical quadrupole transitions. We demonstrate this method with the $I=3/2$ isotope $^{137}\mbox{Ba}^+$ to achieve a SPAM infidelity of $\left(9.0 \pm 1.3\right) \times 10^{-5}$ ($-40.5 \pm 0.6$ dB), facilitating the use of a wider range of ion isotopes with favorable wavelengths and masses for quantum computation.

Nascent platforms for programmable quantum simulation offer unprecedented access to new regimes of far-from-equilibrium quantum many-body dynamics in (approximately) isolated systems. Here, achieving precise control over quantum many-body entanglement is an essential task for quantum sensing and computation. Extensive theoretical work suggests that these capabilities can enable dynamical phases and critical phenomena that exhibit topologically-robust methods to create, protect, and manipulate quantum entanglement that self-correct against large classes of errors. However, to date, experimental realizations have been confined to classical (non-entangled) symmetry-breaking orders. In this work, we demonstrate an emergent dynamical symmetry protected topological phase (EDSPT), in a quasiperiodically-driven array of ten $^{171}\text{Yb}^+$ hyperfine qubits in Honeywell's System Model H1 trapped-ion quantum processor. This phase exhibits edge qubits that are dynamically protected from control errors, cross-talk, and stray fields. Crucially, this edge protection relies purely on emergent dynamical symmetries that are absolutely stable to generic coherent perturbations. This property is special to quasiperiodically driven systems: as we demonstrate, the analogous edge states of a periodically driven qubit-array are vulnerable to symmetry-breaking errors and quickly decohere. Our work paves the way for implementation of more complex dynamical topological orders that would enable error-resilient techniques to manipulate quantum information.

Quantum computers have the potential to efficiently simulate the dynamics of many interacting quantum particles, a classically intractable task of central importance to fields ranging from chemistry to high-energy physics. However, precision and memory limitations of existing hardware severely limit the size and complexity of models that can be simulated with conventional methods. Here, we demonstrate and benchmark a new scalable quantum simulation paradigm--holographic quantum dynamics simulation--which uses efficient quantum data compression afforded by quantum tensor networks along with opportunistic mid-circuit measurement and qubit reuse to simulate physical systems that have far more quantum degrees of freedom than can be captured by the available number of qubits. Using a Honeywell trapped ion quantum processor, we simulate the non-integrable (chaotic) dynamics of the self-dual kicked Ising model starting from an entangled state of $32$ spins using at most $9$ trapped ion qubits, obtaining excellent quantitative agreement when benchmarking against dynamics computed directly in the thermodynamic limit via recently developed exact analytical techniques. These results suggest that quantum tensor network methods, together with state-of-the-art quantum processor capabilities, enable a viable path to practical quantum advantage in the near term.

The ability to selectively measure, initialize, and reuse qubits during a quantum circuit enables a mapping of the spatial structure of certain tensor-network states onto the dynamics of quantum circuits, thereby achieving dramatic resource savings when using a quantum computer to simulate many-body systems with limited entanglement. We experimentally demonstrate a significant benefit of this approach to quantum simulation: In addition to all correlation functions, the entanglement structure of an infinite system -- specifically the half-chain entanglement spectrum -- is conveniently encoded within a small register of "bond qubits" and can be extracted with relative ease. Using a trapped-ion QCCD quantum computer equipped with selective mid-circuit measurement and reset, we quantitatively determine the near-critical entanglement entropy of a correlated spin chain directly in the thermodynamic limit and show that its phase transition becomes quickly resolved upon expanding the bond-qubit register.