Formation of robust bound states of interacting microwave photons
Creators: name: Morvan, Alexis
name: Andersen, Trond I.
name: Mi, Xiao
name: Neill, Charles
name: Petukhov, Andre
name: Kechedzhi, Kostyantyn
name: Abanin, Dmitry
name: Acharya, Rajeev
name: Arute, Frank
name: Arya, Kunal
name: Asfaw, Abraham
name: Atalaya, Juan
name: Babbush, Ryan
name: Bacon, Dave
name: Bardin, Joseph C.
name: Basso, Joao
name: Bengtsson, Andreas
name: Bortoli, Gina
name: Bourassa, Alexandre
name: Bovaird, Jenna
name: Brill, Leon
name: Broughton, Michael
name: Buckley, Bob B.
name: Buell, David A.
name: Burger, Tim
name: Burkett, Brian
name: Bushnell, Nicholas
name: Chen, Zijun
name: Chiaro, Ben
name: Collins, Roberto
name: Conner, Paul
name: Courtney, William
name: Crook, Alexander L.
name: Curtin, Ben
name: Debroy, Dripto M.
name: Barba, Alexander Del Toro
name: Demura, Sean
name: Dunsworth, Andrew
name: Eppens, Daniel
name: Erickson, Catherine
name: Faoro, Lara
name: Farhi, Edward
name: Fatemi, Reza
name: Burgos, Leslie Flores
name: Forati, Ebrahim
name: Fowler, Austin G.
name: Foxen, Brooks
name: Giang, William
name: Gidney, Craig
name: Gilboa, Dar
name: Giustina, Marissa
name: Dau, Alejandro Grajales
name: Gross, Jonathan A.
name: Habegger, Steve
name: Hamilton, Michael C.
name: Harrigan, Matthew P.
name: Harrington, Sean D.
name: Hilton, Jeremy
name: Hoffmann, Markus
name: Hong, Sabrina
name: Huang, Trent
name: Huff, Ashley
name: Huggins, William J.
name: Isakov, Sergei V.
name: Iveland, Justin
name: Jeffrey, Evan
name: Jiang, Zhang
name: Jones, Cody
name: Juhas, Pavol
name: Kafri, Dvir
name: Khattar, Tanuj
name: Khezri, Mostafa
name: Kieferova, Marika
name: Kim, Seon
name: Kitaev, Alexei
name: Klimov, Paul V.
name: Klots, Andrey R.
name: Korotkov, Alexander N.
name: Kostritsa, Fedor
name: Kreikebaum, John Mark
name: Landhuis, David
name: Laptev, Pavel
name: Lau, Kim-Ming
name: Laws, Lily
name: Lee, Joonho
name: Lee, Kenny
name: Lester, Brian J.
name: Lill, Alexander
name: Liu, Wayne
name: Locharla, Aditya
name: Lucero, Erik
name: Malone, Fionn D.
name: Martin, Orion
name: McClean, Jarrod R.
name: McEwen, Matt
name: Costa, Bernardo Meurer
name: Miao, Kevin C.
name: Mohseni, Masoud
name: Montazeri, Shirin
name: Mount, Emily
name: Mruczkiewicz, Wojciech
name: Naaman, Ofer
name: Neeley, Matthew
name: Nersisyan, Ani
name: Newman, Michael
name: Nguyen, Anthony
name: Nguyen, Murray
name: Niu, Murphy Yuezhen
name: O'Brien, Thomas E.
name: Olenewa, Ricardo
name: Opremcak, Alex
name: Potter, Rebecca
name: Quintana, Chris
name: Rubin, Nicholas C.
name: Saei, Negar
name: Sank, Daniel
name: Sankaragomathi, Kannan
name: Satzinger, Kevin J.
name: Schurkus, Henry F.
name: Schuster, Christopher
name: Shearn, Michael J.
name: Shorter, Aaron
name: Shvarts, Vladimir
name: Skruzny, Jindra
name: Smith, W. Clarke
name: Sterling, George
name: Strain, Doug
name: Su, Yuan
name: Szalay, Marco
name: Torres, Alfredo
name: Vidal, Guifre
name: Villalonga, Benjamin
name: Heidweiller, Catherine Vollgraff
name: White, Theodore
name: Xing, Cheng
name: Yao, Z. Jamie
name: Yeh, Ping
name: Yoo, Juhwan
name: Zalcman, Adam
name: Zhang, Yaxing
name: Zhu, Ningfeng
name: Neven, Hartmut
name: Boixo, Sergio
name: Megrant, Anthony
name: Kelly, Julian
name: Chen, Yu
name: Smelyanskiy, Vadim
name: Aleiner, Igor
name: Ioffe, Lev B.
name: Roushan, Pedram
Publisher: name: arXiv
Year: 2022
Subjects: subject: Quantum Physics (quant-ph)
subject: Mesoscale and Nanoscale Physics (cond-mat.mes-hall)
subject: Other Condensed Matter (cond-mat.other)
subject: FOS: Physical sciences
subject: FOS: Physical sciences

description: Systems of correlated particles appear in many fields of science and represent some of the most intractable puzzles in nature. The computational challenge in these systems arises when interactions become comparable to other energy scales, which makes the state of each particle depend on all other particles. The lack of general solutions for the 3-body problem and acceptable theory for strongly correlated electrons shows that our understanding of correlated systems fades when the particle number or the interaction strength increases. One of the hallmarks of interacting systems is the formation of multi-particle bound states. In a ring of 24 superconducting qubits, we develop a high fidelity parameterizable fSim gate that we use to implement the periodic quantum circuit of the spin-1/2 XXZ model, an archetypal model of interaction. By placing microwave photons in adjacent qubit sites, we study the propagation of these excitations and observe their bound nature for up to 5 photons. We devise a phase sensitive method for constructing the few-body spectrum of the bound states and extract their pseudo-charge by introducing a synthetic flux. By introducing interactions between the ring and additional qubits, we observe an unexpected resilience of the bound states to integrability breaking. This finding goes against the common wisdom that bound states in non-integrable systems are unstable when their energies overlap with the continuum spectrum. Our work provides experimental evidence for bound states of interacting photons and discovers their stability beyond the integrability limit.
description: 7 pages + 15 pages supplements