Characterizing a non-equilibrium phase transition on a quantum computer

Quantum many-body systems can exhibit rich universal behavior at the transition between phases of matter, even for systems far from equilibrium. Probing the dynamics of a quantum system undergoing a non-equilibrium phase transition is a difficult task for a classical computer and one that could be done potentially faster on a quantum computer. In this talk, we present our recent work [1] where we use the Quantinuum H1-1 quantum computer to realize a non-equilibrium phase transition in a dissipative quantum circuit generalization of a classical disease spreading model that is known to possess an absorbing state transition. We use techniques such as qubit-reuse [2] and “error avoidance” based on real-time conditional logic to realize a large-scale quantum simulation (of systems with 73 sites time evolved up to 72 circuit layers) with quantitatively accurate signatures of the critical scaling at the phase transition.



[1] E. Chertkov et al. arXiv:2209.12889 (2022).

[2] M. DeCross et al. arXiv:2210.08039 (2022).