English

Probing Operator Spreading via Floquet Engineering in a Superconducting Circuit

Quantum Physics 2022-10-17 v2

Abstract

Operator spreading, often characterized by out-of-time-order correlators (OTOCs), is one of the central concepts in quantum many-body physics. However, measuring OTOCs is experimentally challenging due to the requirement of reversing the time evolution of systems. Here we apply Floquet engineering to investigate operator spreading in a superconducting 10-qubit chain. Floquet engineering provides an effective way to tune the coupling strength between nearby qubits, which is used to demonstrate quantum walks with tunable couplings, reversed time evolution, and the measurement of OTOCs. A clear light-cone-like operator propagation is observed in the system with multiple excitations, and has a nearly equal velocity as the single-particle quantum walk. For the butterfly operator that is nonlocal (local) under the Jordan-Wigner transformation, the OTOCs show distinct behaviors with (without) a signature of information scrambling in the near integrable system.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2108.01276,
  title  = {Probing Operator Spreading via Floquet Engineering in a Superconducting Circuit},
  author = {S. K. Zhao and Zi-Yong Ge and Zhongcheng Xiang and G. M. Xue and H. S. Yan and Z. T. Wang and Zhan Wang and H. K. Xu and F. F. Su and Z. H. Yang and He Zhang and Yu-Ran Zhang and Xue-Yi Guo and Kai Xu and Ye Tian and H. F. Yu and D. N. Zheng and Heng Fan and S. P. Zhao},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2108.01276},
  year   = {2022}
}

Comments

6+12 pages, 4 figures

R2 v1 2026-06-24T04:46:43.024Z