Mapping a topology-disorder phase diagram with a quantum simulator*

The competition and interplay of topology and disorder has been one of the most famous topics in the field of condensed matter physics. In addition to the intuitive tendency to bring the system into a topologically trivial and localized phase, it has been discovered that disorder can also induce nontrivial topology and transport. To reveal rich and diverse phase structures, mapping phase diagrams plays an important role in both theoretical and experimental sides. Quantum simulation provides a prospective way to study the target model, explore the phase diagram and reveal the underlying mechanism. Thanks to the unprecedented controllability, superconducting quantum simulators have been introduced to investigate complex many-body physics and bring thought experiments into reality. To our best knowledge, the effort to map a phase diagram with a rich structure is still lacking. Here we report a systematic experimental study of the topology-disorder phase diagram with 32 qubits on a programmable analog quantum simulator. We implement one-dimensional (1D) disordered dimerized tight-binding models over a wide parameter range and observe diverse phases, including the topological Anderson insulator (TAI) and the inverse Anderson localization (IAL). Our experiment manifests the efficiency, accuracy and flexibility of the superconducting-circuit device and paves the way to the demonstration and understanding of many-body phenomena with noisy intermediate-scale quantum simulators.