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.

[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.

Second, many systems emulate specific Hamiltonians and study their ground state properties, quantum phase transitions, or time dynamics.

[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.