Engineered two-dimensional Ising interactions on a trapped-ion quantum simulator with hundreds of spins

Published

April 26, 2012

Author(s)

Joseph W. Britton, Brian C. Sawyer, Adam Keith, C.-C. Joseph Wang, James K. Freericks, Hermann Uys, Michael Biercuk, John J. Bollinger

Abstract

The presence of long-range quantum spin correlations underlies a variety of physical phenomena in condensed matter systems, potentially including high-temperature superconductivity, making this a fertile area for exploration. Unfortunately, many properties of exotic strongly correlated systems (e.g. spin liquids) have proved difficult to study in part because calculations involving N-body entanglement become intractable for as few as N^~30 particles. Feynman divined that a quantum simulator – a special-purpose "analog" processor built using quantum particles (qubits) – would be inherently adept at such problems. Several recent experiments have demonstrated the feasibility of this approach at a small scale in the context of quantum magnetism. However, no useful simulator for quantum magnetism – consisting of at least 50 particles and allowing controlled, tunable interactions in a two-dimensional (2D) system – has yet been demonstrated owing to the technical challenge of realizing large-scale 2D qubit arrays. Here we simulate a range of Ising-type spin-spin interactions J_ij on a naturally occurring 2D triangular crystal of 100~(d_ij)^-a for 0.05

Citation

Nature

Volume

484

Pub Type

Journals

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Keywords

Ion trapping, Ising interaction, laser cooling, Penning trap, quantum magnetism, quantum phase transition, quantum simulation, qubit

Citation

Britton, J. , Sawyer, B. , Keith, A. , , C. , Freericks, J. , Uys, H. , Biercuk, M. and Bollinger, J. (2012), Engineered two-dimensional Ising interactions on a trapped-ion quantum simulator with hundreds of spins, Nature, [online], https://tsapps.nist.gov/publication/get_pdf.cfm?pub_id=910061 (Accessed October 13, 2025)