Quantum simulator

[12] Better computational tools are needed to understand and rationally design materials whose properties are believed to depend on the collective quantum behavior of hundreds of particles.

Crucially, simulators also take advantage of a second quantum property called entanglement, allowing the behavior of even physically well separated particles to be correlated.

[18] A trapped-ion simulator, built by a team that included the NIST can engineer and control interactions among hundreds of quantum bits (qubits).

It has passed a series of important benchmarking tests that indicate a capability to solve problems in material science that are impossible to model on conventional computers.

The trapped-ion simulator consists of a tiny, single-plane crystal of hundreds of beryllium ions, less than 1 millimeter in diameter, hovering inside a device called a Penning trap.

Carefully timed microwave and laser pulses then caused the qubits to interact, mimicking the quantum behavior of materials otherwise very difficult to study in the laboratory.

[20] Kim et al., extended the trapped ion quantum simulator to 3 spins, with global antiferromagnetic Ising interactions featuring frustration and showing the link between frustration and entanglement[21] and Islam et al., used adiabatic quantum simulation to demonstrate the sharpening of a phase transition between paramagnetic and ferromagnetic ordering as the number of spins increased from 2 to 9.

[25] Britton, et al. from NIST has experimentally benchmarked Ising interactions in a system of hundreds of qubits for studies of quantum magnetism.

Major aims of these experiments include identifying low-temperature phases or tracking out-of-equilibrium dynamics for various models, problems which are theoretically and numerically intractable.

[35] Several important recent results include the realization of a Mott insulator in a driven-dissipative Bose-Hubbard system and studies of phase transitions in lattices of superconducting resonators coupled to qubits.