Glassy dynamics with softened kinetic constraints on a noisy quantum computer

Abstract:Mid-circuit measurements provide direct access to trajectory-level observables, revealing dynamical structures in many-body systems that are invisible in ensemble-averaged quantities. We exploit this capability to realize and study an instance of the Floquet-East model on a superconducting quantum processor. Here, the combination of mid-circuit measurements, kinetically constrained unitary operations and hardware noise gives rise to intricate many-body phenomena. Analyzing trajectories obtained from temporally and spatially resolved mid-circuit measurements, we identify dynamical heterogeneity --- a hallmark of glassy dynamics. We quantify this emergent behavior by studying the probability of finding inactive space-time regions of a given size. This quantity displays a crossover from an area- to perimeter-dominated scaling, which is a characteristic property of glasses and is associated with the proximity to a dynamical first-order phase transition. Our results establish current noisy intermediate-scale quantum devices as scalable testbeds for investigating correlated many-body phenomena at the level of measurement trajectories.

Quantum Physics (quant-ph); Statistical Mechanics (cond-mat.stat-mech)

arXiv:2608.19335 [quant-ph]

(or arXiv:2608.19335v1 [quant-ph] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2608.19335 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)

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