Quantum simulator could help uncover materials for high-performance electronics

But some phenomena that occur in materials can be challenging to mimic using quantum computers, leaving gaps in the problems that scientists have explored with quantum hardware.

To fill one of these gaps, MIT researchers developed a technique to generate synthetic electromagnetic fields on superconducting quantum processors. The team demonstrated the technique on a processor comprising 16 qubits.

By dynamically controlling how the 16 qubits in their processor are coupled to one another, the researchers were able to emulate how electrons move between atoms in the presence of an electromagnetic field. Moreover, the synthetic electromagnetic field is broadly adjustable, enabling scientists to explore a range of material properties.

Emulating electromagnetic fields is crucial to fully explore the properties of materials. In the future, this technique could shed light on key features of electronic systems, such as conductivity, polarization, and magnetization.

“Quantum computers are powerful tools for studying the physics of materials and other quantum mechanical systems. Our work enables us to simulate much more of the rich physics that has captivated materials scientists,” says Ilan Rosen, an MIT postdoc and lead author of a paper on the quantum simulator.

The senior author is William D. Oliver, the Henry Ellis Warren professor of electrical engineering and computer science and of physics, director of the Center for Quantum Engineering, leader of the Engineering Quantum Systems group, and associate director of the Research Laboratory of Electronics. Oliver and Rosen are joined by others in the departments of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and of Physics and at MIT Lincoln Laboratory. The research appears today in Nature Physics.

A quantum emulator

Companies like IBM and Google are striving to build large-scale digital quantum computers that hold the promise of outperforming their classical counterparts by running certain algorithms far more rapidly.

But that’s not all quantum computers can do. The dynamics of qubits and their couplings can also be carefully constructed to mimic the behavior of electrons as they move among atoms in solids.

“That leads to an obvious application, which is to use these superconducting quantum computers as emulators of materials,” says Jeffrey Grover, a research scientist at MIT and co-author on the paper.

Rather than trying to build large-scale digital quantum computers to solve extremely complex problems, researchers can use the qubits in smaller-scale quantum computers as analog devices to replicate a material system in a controlled environment.

“General-purpose digital quantum simulators hold tremendous promise, but they are still a long way off. Analog emulation is another approach that may yield useful results in the near-term, particularly for studying materials. It is a straightforward and powerful application of quantum hardware,” explains Rosen. “Using an analog quantum emulator, I can intentionally set a starting point and then watch what unfolds as a function of time.”

Despite their close similarity to materials, there are a few important ingredients in materials that can’t be easily reflected on quantum computing hardware. One such ingredient is a magnetic field.

In materials, electrons “live” in atomic orbitals. When two atoms are close to one another, their orbitals overlap and electrons can “hop” from one atom to another. In the presence of a magnetic field, that hopping behavior becomes more complex.

On a superconducting quantum computer, microwave photons hopping between qubits are used to mimic electrons hopping between atoms. But, because photons are not charged particles like electrons, the photons’ hopping behavior would remain the same in a physical magnetic field.

Since they can’t just turn on a magnetic field in their simulator, the MIT team employed a few tricks to synthesize the effects of one instead.

Tuning up the processor

The researchers adjusted how adjacent qubits in the processor were coupled to each other to create the same complex hopping behavior that electromagnetic fields cause in electrons.

To do that, they slightly changed the energy of each qubit by applying different microwave signals. Usually, researchers will set qubits to the same energy so that photons can hop from one to another. But for this technique, they dynamically varied the energy of each qubit to change how they communicate with each other.

By precisely modulating these energy levels, the researchers enabled photons to hop between qubits in the same complex manner that electrons hop between atoms in a magnetic field.

Plus, because they can finely tune the microwave signals, they can emulate a range of electromagnetic fields with different strengths and distributions.

The researchers undertook several rounds of experiments to determine what energy to set for each qubit, how strongly to modulate them, and the microwave frequency to use.

“The most challenging part was finding modulation settings for each qubit so that all 16 qubits work at once,” Rosen says.

Once they arrived at the right settings, they confirmed that the dynamics of the photons uphold several equations that form the foundation of electromagnetism. They also demonstrated the “Hall effect,” a conduction phenomenon that exists in the presence of an electromagnetic field.

These results show that their synthetic electromagnetic field behaves like the real thing.

Moving forward, they could use this technique to precisely study complex phenomena in condensed matter physics, such as phase transitions that occur when a material changes from a conductor to an insulator.

“A nice feature of our emulator is that we need only change the modulation amplitude or frequency to mimic a different material system. In this way, we can scan over many materials properties or model parameters without having to physically fabricate a new device each time.” says Oliver.

While this work was an initial demonstration of a synthetic electromagnetic field, it opens the door to many potential discoveries, Rosen says.

“The beauty of quantum computers is that we can look at exactly what is happening at every moment in time on every qubit, so we have all this information at our disposal. We are in a very exciting place for the future,” he adds.