Evidence of Kardar-Parisi-Zhang scaling on a digital quantum simulator

Abstract

Abstract Understanding how hydrodynamic behaviour emerges from the unitary evolution of the many-particle Schrödinger equation is a central goal of non-equilibrium statistical mechanics. In this work we implement a digital simulation of the discrete time quantum dynamics of a spin- $$\frac{1}{2}$$ 1 2 XXZ spin chain on a noisy near-term quantum device, and we extract the high temperature transport exponent at the isotropic point. We simulate the temporal decay of the relevant spin correlation function at high temperature using a pseudo-random state generated by a random circuit that is specifically tailored to the ibmq-montreal 27 qubit device. The resulting output is a spin excitation on a homogeneous background on a 21 qubit chain on the device. From the subsequent discrete time dynamics on the device we are able to extract an anomalous super-diffusive exponent consistent with the conjectured Kardar-Parisi-Zhang (KPZ) scaling at the isotropic point. Furthermore we simulate the restoration of spin diffusion with the application of an integrability breaking potential.