Floquet Prethermal Phase Protected by U(1) Symmetry on a Superconducting Quantum Processor

Understand

Periodically driven systems, or Floquet systems, exhibit many novel dynamics and interesting out-of-equilibrium phases of matter.

• Those phases arising with the quantum systems' symmetries, such as global $U(1)$ symmetry, can even show dynamical stability with symmetry-protection.
• Here we experimentally demonstrate a $U(1)$ symmetry-protected prethermal phase, via performing a digital-analog quantum simulation on a superconducting quantum processor.
• The dynamical stability of this phase is revealed by its robustness against external perturbations.