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A hybrid system with tunable coupling between phonons and qubits shows great potential for advancing quantum information processing. In this work, we demonstrate strong and tunable coupling between a surface acoustic wave (SAW) resonator and a transmon qubit based on galvanic-contact flip-chip technique. The coupling strength varies from $2\pi\times$7.0 MHz to -$2\pi\times$20.6 MHz, which is extracted from different vacuum Rabi oscillation frequencies. The phonon-induced ac Stark shift of the qubit at different coupling strengths is also shown. Our approach offers a good experimental platform for exploring quantum acoustics and hybrid systems.

Isolated interacting quantum systems generally thermalize, yet there are several counterexamples for the breakdown of ergodicity, such as many-body localization and quantum scars. Recently, ergodicity breaking has been observed in systems subjected to linear potentials, termed Stark many-body localization. This phenomenon is closely associated with Hilbert-space fragmentation, characterized by a strong dependence of dynamics on initial conditions. Here, we experimentally explore initial-state dependent dynamics using a ladder-type superconducting processor with up to 24 qubits, which enables precise control of the qubit frequency and initial state preparation. In systems with linear potentials, we observe distinct non-equilibrium dynamics for initial states with the same quantum numbers and energy, but with varying domain wall numbers. This distinction becomes increasingly pronounced as the system size grows, in contrast with disordered interacting systems. Our results provide convincing experimental evidence of the fragmentation in Stark systems, enriching our understanding of the weak breakdown of ergodicity., Comment: main text: 7 pages, 4 figures; supplementary: 13 pages, 14 figures

Thouless pumping, a dynamical version of the integer quantum Hall effect, represents the quantized charge pumped during an adiabatic cyclic evolution. Here we report experimental observations of nontrivial topological pumping that is induced by disorder even during a topologically trivial pumping trajectory. With a 41-qubit superconducting quantum processor, we develop a Floquet engineering technique to realize cycles of adiabatic pumping by simultaneously varying the on-site potentials and the hopping couplings. We demonstrate Thouless pumping in the presence of disorder and show its breakdown as the strength of disorder increases. Moreover, we observe two types of topological pumping that are induced by on-site potential disorder and hopping disorder, respectively. Especially, an intrinsic topological pump that is induced by quasi-periodic hopping disorder has never been experimentally realized before. Our highly controllable system provides a valuable quantum simulating platform for studying various aspects of topological physics in the presence of disorder.

The development of fault-tolerant quantum processors relies on the ability to control noise. A particularly insidious form of noise is temporally correlated or non-Markovian noise. By combining randomized benchmarking with supervised machine learning algorithms, we develop a method to learn the details of temporally correlated noise. In particular, we can learn the time-independent evolution operator of system plus bath and this leads to (i) the ability to characterize the degree of non-Markovianity of the dynamics and (ii) the ability to predict the dynamics of the system even beyond the times we have used to train our model. We exemplify this by implementing our method on a superconducting quantum processor. Our experimental results show a drastic change between the Markovian and non-Markovian regimes for the learning accuracies., Comment: 4 pages, 3 figures

Characterizing the nature of hydrodynamical transport properties in quantum dynamics provides valuable insights into the fundamental understanding of exotic non-equilibrium phases of matter. Experimentally simulating infinite-temperature transport on large-scale complex quantum systems is of considerable interest. Here, using a controllable and coherent superconducting quantum simulator, we experimentally realize the analog quantum circuit, which can efficiently prepare the Haar-random states, and probe spin transport at infinite temperature. We observe diffusive spin transport during the unitary evolution of the ladder-type quantum simulator with ergodic dynamics. Moreover, we explore the transport properties of the systems subjected to strong disorder or a tilted potential, revealing signatures of anomalous subdiffusion in accompany with the breakdown of thermalization. Our work demonstrates a scalable method of probing infinite-temperature spin transport on analog quantum simulators, which paves the way to study other intriguing out-of-equilibrium phenomena from the perspective of transport., Comment: Main text: 13 pages, 5 figures; Supplementary: 17 pages, 16 figures, 1 table

Simulating the dynamics of open quantum systems is essential in achieving practical quantum computation and understanding novel nonequilibrium behaviors. However, quantum simulation of a many-body system coupled to an engineered reservoir has yet to be fully explored in present-day experiment platforms. In this work, we introduce engineered noise into a one-dimensional ten-qubit superconducting quantum processor to emulate a generic many-body open quantum system. Our approach originates from the stochastic unravellings of the master equation. By measuring the end-to-end correlation, we identify multiple steady states stemmed from a strong symmetry, which is established on the modified Hamiltonian via Floquet engineering. Furthermore, we find that the information saved in the initial state maintains in the steady state driven by the continuous dissipation on a five-qubit chain. Our work provides a manageable and hardware-efficient strategy for the open-system quantum simulation.

Quantum simulation of different exotic topological phases of quantum matter on a noisy intermediate-scale quantum (NISQ) processor is attracting growing interest. Here, we develop a one-dimensional 43-qubit superconducting quantum processor, named as Chuang-tzu, to simulate and characterize emergent topological states. By engineering diagonal Aubry-Andr$\acute{\mathrm{e}}$-Harper (AAH) models, we experimentally demonstrate the Hofstadter butterfly energy spectrum. Using Floquet engineering, we verify the existence of the topological zero modes in the commensurate off-diagonal AAH models, which have never been experimentally realized before. Remarkably, the qubit number over 40 in our quantum processor is large enough to capture the substantial topological features of a quantum system from its complex band structure, including Dirac points, the energy gap's closing, the difference between even and odd number of sites, and the distinction between edge and bulk states. Our results establish a versatile hybrid quantum simulation approach to exploring quantum topological systems in the NISQ era., Comment: Main text: 6 pages, 4 figures; Supplementary: 16 pages, 14 figures

Multipartite entanglement is a key resource for quantum computation. It is expected theoretically that entanglement transition may happen for multipartite random quantum states, however, which is still absent experimentally. Here, we report the observation of entanglement transition quantified by negativity using a fully connected 20-qubit superconducting processor. We implement multi-layer pseudo-random circuits to generate pseudo-random pure states of 7 to 15 qubits. Then, we investigate negativity spectra of reduced density matrices obtained by quantum state tomography for 6 qubits.Three different phases can be identified by calculating logarithmic negativities based on the negativity spectra. We observe the phase transitions by changing the sizes of environment and subsystems. The randomness of our circuits can be also characterized by quantifying the distance between the distribution of output bit-string probabilities and Porter-Thomas distribution. Our simulator provides a powerful tool to generate random states and understand the entanglement structure for multipartite quantum systems.

Quantum simulation enables study of many-body systems in non-equilibrium by mapping to a controllable quantum system, providing a new tool for computational intractable problems. Here, using a programmable quantum processor with a chain of 10 superconducting qubits interacted through tunable couplers, we simulate the one-dimensional generalized Aubry-Andr\'e-Harper model for three different phases, i.e., extended, localized and critical phases. The properties of phase transitions and many-body dynamics are studied in the presence of quasi-periodic modulations for both off-diagonal hopping coefficients and on-site potentials of the model controlled respectively by adjusting strength of couplings and qubit frequencies. We observe the spin transport for initial single- and multi-excitation states in different phases, and characterize phase transitions by experimentally measuring dynamics of participation entropies. Our experimental results demonstrate that the newly developed tunable coupling architecture of superconducting processor extends greatly the simulation realms for a wide variety of Hamiltonians, and may trigger further investigations on various quantum and topological phenomena., Comment: 12 pages, 4 figures, with Supplementary Materials

We study the wave-particle duality in a general Mach-Zehnder interferometer with an asymmetric beam splitter from the viewpoint of quantum information theory. The correlations(including the classical correlation and the quantum correlation) between the particle and the which-path detector are derived when they are in pure state or mixed state at the output of Mach-Zehnder interferometer. It is found that the fringe visibility and the correlations are effected by the asymmetric beam splitter and the input state of the particle. The complementary relations between the fringe visibility and the correlations are also presented., Comment: arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1812.04348

Hawking radiation is one of the quantum features of a black hole that can be understood as a quantum tunneling across the event horizon of the black hole, but it is quite difficult to directly observe the Hawking radiation of an astrophysical black hole. Here, we report a fermionic lattice-model-type realization of an analogue black hole by using a chain of 10 superconducting transmon qubits with interactions mediated by 9 transmon-type tunable couplers. The quantum walks of quasi-particle in the curved spacetime reflect the gravitational effect near the black hole, resulting in the behaviour of stimulated Hawking radiation, which is verified by the state tomography measurement of all 7 qubits outside the horizon. In addition, the dynamics of entanglement in the curved spacetime is directly measured. Our results would stimulate more interests to explore the related features of black holes using the programmable superconducting processor with tunable couplers., Comment: 25 pages, 19 figures

Lattice gauge theories (LGTs) are one of the most fundamental subjects in many-body physics, and has recently attracted considerable research interests in quantum simulations. Here we experimentally investigate the emergent $\mathbb{Z}_2$ gauge invariance in a 1D superconducting circuit with 10 transmon qubits. By precisely adjusting staggered longitudinal and transverse fields to each qubit, we construct an effective Hamiltonian containing an LGT and gauge-broken terms. The corresponding matter sector can exhibit a localization, and there also exists a 3-qubit operator, of which the expectation value can retain nonzero for a long time in low-energy regimes. The above localization can be regarded as the confinement of matter fields, and the 3-body operator is the $\mathbb{Z}_2$ gauge generator. These experimental results demonstrate that, despite the absence of gauge structure in the effective Hamiltonian, $\mathbb{Z}_2$ gauge invariance can still emerge in low-energy regimes. Our work provides a method for both theoretically and experimentally studying the rich physics in quantum many-body systems with emergent gauge invariance., Comment: 7+9 pages, 4+6 figures

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., Comment: 6+12 pages, 4 figures

Multipartite entangled states are significant resources for both quantum information processing and quantum metrology. In particular, non-Gaussian entangled states are predicted to achieve a higher sensitivity of precision measurements than Gaussian states. On the basis of metrological sensitivity, the conventional linear Ramsey squeezing parameter (RSP) efficiently characterises the Gaussian entangled atomic states but fails for much wider classes of highly sensitive non-Gaussian states. These complex non-Gaussian entangled states can be classified by the nonlinear squeezing parameter (NLSP), as a generalisation of the RSP with respect to nonlinear observables, and identified via the Fisher information. However, the NLSP has never been measured experimentally. Using a 19-qubit programmable superconducting processor, here we report the characterisation of multiparticle entangled states generated during its nonlinear dynamics. First, selecting 10 qubits, we measure the RSP and the NLSP by single-shot readouts of collective spin operators in several different directions. Then, by extracting the Fisher information of the time-evolved state of all 19 qubits, we observe a large metrological gain of 9.89$^{+0.28}_{-0.29}$ dB over the standard quantum limit, indicating a high level of multiparticle entanglement for quantum-enhanced phase sensitivity. Benefiting from high-fidelity full controls and addressable single-shot readouts, the superconducting processor with interconnected qubits provides an ideal platform for engineering and benchmarking non-Gaussian entangled states that are useful for quantum-enhanced metrology., Comment: 13+12 pages, 10+2 figures

The Bloch oscillation (BO) and Wannier-Stark localization (WSL) are fundamental concepts about metal-insulator transitions in condensed matter physics. These phenomena have also been observed in semiconductor superlattices and simulated in platforms such as photonic waveguide arrays and cold atoms. Here, we report experimental investigation of BOs and WSL simulated with a 5-qubit programmable superconducting processor, of which the effective Hamiltonian is an isotropic $XY$ spin chain. When applying a linear potential to the system by properly tuning all individual qubits, we observe that the propagation of a single spin on the chain is suppressed. It tends to oscillate near the neighborhood of their initial positions, which demonstrates the characteristics of BOs and WSL. We verify that the WSL length is inversely correlated to the potential gradient. Benefiting from the precise single-shot simultaneous readout of all qubits in our experiments, we can also investigate the thermal transport, which requires the joint measurement of more than one qubits. The experimental results show that, as an essential characteristic for BOs and WSL, the thermal transport is also blocked under a linear potential. Our experiment would be scalable to more superconducting qubits for simulating various of out-of-equilibrium problems in quantum many-body systems., Comment: 8+12 pages, 4 figures