Construction of various time-dependent Hamiltonians on a single photonic chip

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates the construction of various time-dependent Hamiltonians on a single integrated photonic chip using a high-Q microresonator with electro-optic modulation, enabling versatile quantum simulations.

Contribution

It introduces a novel method to realize and control time-dependent Hamiltonians on a single chip with high tunability and reconfigurability using a microresonator and bichromatic modulation.

Findings

Achieved synthetic frequency lattice with up to 152 sites.

Constructed different time-dependent Hamiltonians with tunable coupling.

Demonstrated dynamic band structure measurements.

Abstract

Integrated photonics provides an important platform for simulating physical models with high-performance chip-scale devices, where the lattice size and the time-dependence of a model are key ingredients for further enriching the functionality of a photonic chip. Here, we propose and demonstrate the construction of various time-dependent Hamiltonian models using a single microresonator on thin-film lithium niobate chip. Such an integrated microresonator holds high quality factor to 10^6, and supports the construction of the synthetic frequency lattice with effective lattice sites up to 152 under the electro-optic modulation. By further applying a bichromatic modulation composed of two radio-frequency signals oppositely detuned from the resonant frequency in the microresonator, we build different time-dependent Hamiltonians with the time-varying nearest-neighbor coupling strength in synthetic frequency lattice. We measure the temporal features from capturing the dynamic band structures of the lattice and demonstrate a variety of time-dependent synthetic lattice models by engineering the driven pattern of the modulation, highlighting great flexibility of the microresonator. Our work shows a photonic chip for simulating versatile time-dependent Hamiltonians, which pushes forward quantum simulations in integrated photonics with great experimental tunability and reconfigurability.