Observing Conformal Floquet Dynamics on a Digital Quantum Processor

Abstract:Quantum simulations are traditionally confined to exploring dynamics starting from unentangled or low-entanglement states due to severe bottlenecks in protocol design, hardware performance, and classical verification. Here, we report the first quantum simulation of non-equilibrium dynamics initiated directly from a many-body critical ground state. Using a fully-connected trapped-ion processor, we prepare the critical ground state of a transverse-field Ising model via a hardware-tailored, logarithmic-depth quantum circuit based on multi-scale entanglement renormalization. Following this initialization, we apply a deep Floquet drive that maintains emergent conformal symmetry, enabling us to benchmark lattice dynamics against analytical results from continuum theory. In the resulting conformal heating phase, we extract a central charge consistent with the Ising universality class ($c=1/2$) from the universal decay of the Loschmidt echo and observe spatial energy localization predicted by field theory. Conversely, the non-heating phase exhibits global finite-time revivals. This work establishes a scalable and versatile framework for exploring critical quantum dynamics.

Quantum Physics (quant-ph); Statistical Mechanics (cond-mat.stat-mech); Strongly Correlated Electrons (cond-mat.str-el)

arXiv:2605.27530 [quant-ph]

(or arXiv:2605.27530v2 [quant-ph] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2605.27530 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite

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