A Rydberg Quantum Simulator

TL;DR

This paper proposes using laser-excited Rydberg atoms in optical lattices to build a universal quantum simulator capable of emulating complex many-body quantum systems, including exotic spin models and dissipative entanglement processes.

Contribution

It introduces a novel Rydberg atom-based architecture for universal quantum simulation, enabling high-fidelity n-qubit gates and simulation of complex Hamiltonians with both coherent and dissipative dynamics.

Findings

Efficient high-fidelity n-qubit entangling gates demonstrated.

Simulation of exotic spin models like Kitaev toric code achieved.

Framework for dissipative entangled state preparation developed.

Abstract

Following Feynman and as elaborated on by Lloyd, a universal quantum simulator (QS) is a controlled quantum device which reproduces the dynamics of any other many particle quantum system with short range interactions. This dynamics can refer to both coherent Hamiltonian and dissipative open system evolution. We investigate how laser excited Rydberg atoms in large spacing optical or magnetic lattices can provide an efficient implementation of a universal QS for spin models involving (high order) n-body interactions. This includes the simulation of Hamiltonians of exotic spin models involving n-particle constraints such as the Kitaev toric code, color code, and lattice gauge theories with spin liquid phases. In addition, it provides the ingredients for dissipative preparation of entangled states based on engineering n-particle reservoir couplings. The key basic building blocks of our architecture are efficient and high-fidelity n-qubit entangling gates via auxiliary Rydberg atoms, including a possible dissipative time step via optical pumping. This allows to mimic the time evolution of the system by a sequence of fast, parallel and high-fidelity n-particle coherent and dissipative Rydberg gates.