Quantum Simulation of the Bosonic Kitaev Chain

Abstract

Superconducting quantum circuits are a natural platform for quantum simulations of a wide variety of important lattice models describing topological phenomena, spanning condensed matter and high-energy physics. One such model is the bosonic analogue of the well-known fermionic Kitaev chain, a 1D tight-binding model with both nearest-neighbor hopping and pairing terms. Despite being fully Hermitian, the bosonic Kitaev chain exhibits a number of striking features associated with non-Hermitian systems, including chiral transport and a dramatic sensitivity to boundary conditions known as the non-Hermitian skin effect. Here, using a multimode superconducting parametric cavity, we implement the bosonic Kitaev chain in synthetic dimensions. The lattice sites are mapped to frequency modes of the cavity, and the $\text{in situ}$ tunable complex hopping and pairing terms are created by parametric pumping at the mode-difference and mode-sum frequencies, respectively. We experimentally demonstrate important precursors of nontrivial topology and the non-Hermitian skin effect in the bosonic Kitaev chain, including chiral transport, quadrature wavefunction localization, and sensitivity to boundary conditions. Our experiment is an important first step towards exploring genuine many-body non-Hermitian quantum dynamics.

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Cited by in corpus (18)

• A comprehensive review on developments of synthetic dimensions
• The non-Hermitian skin effect: A perspective
• The Interplay of Finite and Infinite Size Stability in Quadratic Bosonic Lindbladians
• Switchable Non-Hermitian Skin Effect in Bogoliubov Modes
• Unconventional and robust light-matter interactions based on the non-Hermitian skin effect
• Quantum Sensing with Driven-Dissipative Su-Schrieffer-Heeger Lattices
• Hidden exceptional point, localization-delocalization phase transition in Hermitian bosonic Kitaev model
• Photon counting statistics in Gaussian bosonic networks
• Unifying Anderson transitions and topological amplification in non-Hermitian chains
• From Chiral Topological Dynamics to Chiral Topological Amplification: Real vs Imaginary Parameters in a Hermitian Bosonic Chain
• Higher order coherence as witness of exceptional point in Hermitian bosonic Kitaev dimer
• Probing quantum phase transition in a staggered Bosonic Kitaev chain via layer-resolved localization-delocalization transition
• Topological Amplification of the Bosonic Kitaev Chain with Non-Uniform Loss
• Ferroelectricity in a magnon Bose-Einstein condensate: Nonreciprocal superfluidity, exceptional points, and Majorana bosons
• Hierarchic superradiant phases in anisotropic Dicke model
• Zero and Nonzero Energy Majorana Modes in an Extended Kitaev Chain
• Continuum Landau surface states in a non-Hermitian Weyl semimetal
• Braiding of dynamical eigenvalues of Hermitian bosonic Kitaev chains