Quantum simulation of Hawking radiation and curved spacetime with a superconducting on-chip black hole

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates a quantum simulation of Hawking radiation and curved spacetime effects using a chain of superconducting qubits, providing insights into black hole physics in a controllable laboratory setting.

Contribution

It introduces a novel superconducting qubit setup to simulate black hole phenomena, including Hawking radiation and entanglement dynamics, in a programmable quantum system.

Findings

Observation of stimulated Hawking radiation via state tomography

Measurement of entanglement dynamics in curved spacetime

Simulation of gravitational effects using superconducting qubits

Abstract

Hawking radiation is one of the quantum features of a black hole that can be understood as a quantum tunneling across the event horizon of the black hole, but it is quite difficult to directly observe the Hawking radiation of an astrophysical black hole. Here, we report a fermionic lattice-model-type realization of an analogue black hole by using a chain of 10 superconducting transmon qubits with interactions mediated by 9 transmon-type tunable couplers. The quantum walks of quasi-particle in the curved spacetime reflect the gravitational effect near the black hole, resulting in the behaviour of stimulated Hawking radiation, which is verified by the state tomography measurement of all 7 qubits outside the horizon. In addition, the dynamics of entanglement in the curved spacetime is directly measured. Our results would stimulate more interests to explore the related features of black holes using the programmable superconducting processor with tunable couplers.