Noise-resilient edge modes on a chain of superconducting qubits

• DOI: 10.1126/science.abq5769
• Publication Date: 2022-11-17T18:58:33Z
• Authors: X. Mi; M. Sonner; M. Y. Niu; K. W. Lee; B. Foxen; R. Acharya; I. Aleiner; T. I. Andersen; F. Arute; K. Arya; A. Asfaw; J. Atalaya; J. C. Bardin; J. Basso; A. Bengtsson; G. Bortoli; A. Bourassa; L. Brill; M. Broughton; B. B. Buckley; D. A. Buell; B. Burkett; N. Bushnell; Z. Chen; B. Chiaro; R. Collins; P. Conner; W. Courtney; A. L. Crook; D. M. Debroy; S. Demura; A. Dunsworth; D. Eppens; C. Erickson; L. Faoro; E. Farhi; R. Fatemi; L. Flores; E. Forati; A. G. Fowler; W. Giang; C. Gidney; D. Gilboa; M. Giustina; A. G. Dau; J. A. Gross; S. Habegger; M. P. Harrigan; M. Hoffmann; S. Hong; T. Huang; A. Huff; W. J. Huggins; L. B. Ioffe; S. V. Isakov; J. Iveland; E. Jeffrey; Z. Jiang; C. Jones; D. Kafri; K. Kechedzhi; T. Khattar; S. Kim; A. Y. Kitaev; P. V. Klimov; A. R. Klots; A. N. Korotkov; F. Kostritsa; J. M. Kreikebaum; D. Landhuis; P. Laptev; K.-M. Lau; J. Lee; L. Laws; W. Liu; A. Locharla; O. Martin; J. R. McClean; M. McEwen; B. Meurer Costa; K. C. Miao; M. Mohseni; S. Montazeri; A. Morvan; E. Mount; W. Mruczkiewicz; O. Naaman; M. Neeley; C. Neill; M. Newman; T. E. O’Brien; A. Opremcak; A. Petukhov; R. Potter; C. Quintana; N. C. Rubin; N. Saei; D. Sank; K. Sankaragomathi; K. J. Satzinger; C. Schuster; M. J. Shearn; V. Shvarts; D. Strain; Y. Su; M. Szalay; G. Vidal; B. Villalonga; C. Vollgraff-Heid...; T. White; Z. Yao; P. Yeh; J. Yoo; A. Zalcman; Y. Zhang; N. Zhu; H. Neven; D. Bacon; J. Hilton; E. Lucero; R. Babbush; S. Boixo; A. Megrant; Y. Chen; J. Kelly; V. Smelyanskiy; D. A. Abanin; P. Roushan
• Keywords: Condensed Matter - Other Condensed Matter; Quantum Physics; 0303 health sciences; 03 medical and health sciences; Multidisciplinary; Condensed Matter - Mesoscale and Nanoscale Physics; Mesoscale and Nanoscale Physics (cond-mat.mes-hall); 500; FOS: Physical sciences; Quantum Physics (quant-ph); 530; Other Condensed Matter (cond-mat.other)

Inherent symmetry of a quantum system may protect its otherwise fragile states. Leveraging such protection requires testing its robustness against uncontrolled environmental interactions. Using 47 superconducting qubits, we implement the one-dimensional kicked Ising model, which exhibits nonlocal Majorana edge modes (MEMs) with

ℤ 2

parity symmetry. We find that any multiqubit Pauli operator overlapping with the MEMs exhibits a uniform late-time decay rate comparable to single-qubit relaxation rates, irrespective of its size or composition. This characteristic allows us to accurately reconstruct the exponentially localized spatial profiles of the MEMs. Furthermore, the MEMs are found to be resilient against certain symmetry-breaking noise owing to a prethermalization mechanism. Our work elucidates the complex interplay between noise and symmetry-protected edge modes in a solid-state environment.