Simulating a Quantum Phase Transition in the Ising Model Using a Superconducting Circuit

Superconducting circuits are a promising platform for analog and digital quantum computing due to their controllability and scalability. In recent years, the fluxonium circuit has emerged as an excellent qubit due to its strong anharmonicity and high coherence times [1,2]. Fluxonium can be viewed as an inductively shunted transmon, such that the inductance forms a closed loop with the phase-slip junction, giving the spectrum flux tunability. In this talk, we present our work on simulating the Transverse Field Ising Model (TFIM) using a chain of 10 inductively coupled fluxonium circuits. When biased at half-integer values of the magnetic flux quantum, the spectrum becomes highly anharmonic, and the 10-circuit hamiltonian takes the form of the TFIM [3]. By tuning the inter-qubit coupling strength across multiple devices, we explore different regimes of the TFIM, establishing fluxonium as a prominent candidate for near-term quantum simulators. 

[1] L. Nguyen et al. Phys. Rev. X (2019)

[2] A. Somoroff et al. arXiv:2103.08578 (2021)

[3] A. Ozguler et al. arXiv:2104.03300 (2021)