Simulating prethermalization using near-term quantum computers

Understand

Quantum simulation is one of the most promising scientific applications of quantum computers.

• Due to decoherence and noise in current devices, it is however challenging to perform digital quantum simulation in a regime that is intractable with classical computers.
• In this work, we propose an experimental protocol for probing dynamics and equilibrium properties on near-term digital quantum computers.
• As a key ingredient of our work, we show that it is possible to study thermalization even with a relatively coarse Trotter decomposition of the Hamiltonian evolution of interest.