The idea of quantum simulation is to emulate the classically intractable dynamics of quantum many-body systems using a well understood and controllable quantum system. Certainly very elegant in theory, such quantum simulators promise breakthroughs in many fields. But to be useful in practice, they need to scale up. One has to be able to control hundreds of particles (or more). And in the quantum regime, the more particles, the trickier they are to handle.
Justin Bohnet and colleagues have now gone beyond the existing proof-of-principle experiments involving up to twenty ions and demonstrated the emulation of the transverse-field Ising model with more than 200 trapped ions. Beryllium ions were trapped and laser-cooled in a Penning trap, forming an orderly structure in a two-dimensional array (pictured). Bohnet et al. studied the quantum spin dynamics and characterized the entanglement of spin-squeezed states, benchmarking the results against theoretical calculations for the still-tractable case of the homogeneous Ising model.
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Georgescu, I. The power of many. Nature Phys 12, 631 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1038/nphys3823
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/nphys3823
