Observation of wave-packet branching through an engineered conical intersection

Abstract

In chemical reactions, the interplay between coherent evolution and dissipation is central to determining key properties such as the rate and yield. Of particular interest are cases where two potential energy surfaces cross at features known as conical intersections (CIs), resulting in nonadiabatic dynamics that may promote ultrafast and highly efficient reactions when rovibrational damping is present. A prominent chemical reaction that involves a CI is the cis-trans isomerization reaction in rhodopsin, which is crucial to vision. CIs in real molecular systems are typically investigated via optical pump-probe spectroscopy, which has demanding spectral bandwidth and temporal resolution requirements, and where precise control of the environment is challenging. A complementary approach for understanding chemical reactions is to use quantum simulators that can provide access to a wider range of observables, though thus far combining strongly interacting linear (rovibrational) and nonlinear (electronic) degrees of freedom with engineered dissipation has yet to be demonstrated. Here, we create a tunable CI in a hybrid qubit-oscillator circuit QED processor and simultaneously track both a reactive wave-packet and electronic qubit in the time-domain. We identify dephasing of the electronic qubit as the mechanism that drives wave-packet branching along the reactive coordinate in our model. Furthermore, we directly observe enhanced branching when the wave-packet passes through the CI. Thus, the forces that influence a chemical reaction can be viewed as an effective measurement induced dephasing rate that depends on the position of the wave-packet relative to the CI. Our results set the groundwork for more complex simulations of chemical dynamics, offering deeper insight into the role of dissipation in determining macroscopic quantities of interest such as the quantum yield of a chemical reaction.

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• Quantum Simulation of Polarized Light-induced Electron Transfer with A Trapped-ion Qutrit System
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• Simulating Vibrational Dynamics on Bosonic Quantum Devices
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• Robust gates with spin-locked superconducting qubits
• A Computational Framework for Simulations of Dissipative Non-Adiabatic Dynamics on Hybrid Oscillator-Qubit Quantum Devices
• Unitary death of Schrödinger's cat
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• Spin Phonon Relaxation Dynamics from a Conical Intersection of Trapped Rydberg Ions
• Co-Designing Spectral Transformation Oracles with Hybrid Oscillator-Qubit Quantum Processors: From Algorithms to Compilation
• Quantum Simulation of Two-Level $PT$-Symmetric Systems Using Hermitian Hamiltonians