Digital quantum magnetism on a trapped-ion quantum computer

Understand

Digital quantum matter -- realized when discrete quantum gates approximate continuous time evolution -- is susceptible to heating into chaotic, structureless states.

• If digitization errors are adequately suppressed, a long-lived transient regime of approximately energy-conserving dynamics can be observed on gate-based quantum computers.
• Conservation of energy, in turn, enables the exploration of a wide variety of complex behaviors observed in equilibrium systems, ranging from the nontrivial microscopic origins of thermalization itself to the stabilization of effective models hosting exotic emergent properties.
• Here, we use Quantinuum's system model H2 quantum computer to simulate digitized dynamics of the quantum Ising model, suppressing digitization errors well enough to observe thermalization on timescales that severely challenge classical simulation methods.