Long-lived topological time-crystalline order on a quantum processor
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.
Cite
@article{arxiv.2401.04333,
title = {Long-lived topological time-crystalline order on a quantum processor},
author = {Liang Xiang and Wenjie Jiang and Zehang Bao and Zixuan Song and Shibo Xu and Ke Wang and Jiachen Chen and Feitong Jin and Xuhao Zhu and Zitian Zhu and Fanhao Shen and Ning Wang and Chuanyu Zhang and Yaozu Wu and Yiren Zou and Jiarun Zhong and Zhengyi Cui and Aosai Zhang and Ziqi Tan and Tingting Li and Yu Gao and Jinfeng Deng and Xu Zhang and Hang Dong and Pengfei Zhang and Si Jiang and Weikang Li and Zhide Lu and Zheng-Zhi Sun and Hekang Li and Zhen Wang and Chao Song and Qiujiang Guo and Fangli Liu and Zhe-Xuan Gong and Alexey V. Gorshkov and Norman Y. Yao and Thomas Iadecola and Francisco Machado and H. Wang and Dong-Ling Deng},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2401.04333},
year = {2024}
}
Comments
8 pages (main text), 16 pages (supplementary information)