Simulating long-range hopping with periodically driven superconducting qubits

Abstract

Quantum computers are a leading platform for the simulation of many-body physics. This task has been recently facilitated by the possibility to program directly the time-dependent pulses sent to the computer. Here, we use this feature to simulate quantum lattice models with long-range hopping. Our approach is based on an exact mapping between periodically driven quantum systems and one-dimensional lattices in the synthetic Floquet direction. By engineering a periodic drive with a power-law spectrum, we simulate a lattice with long-range hopping, whose decay exponent is freely tunable. We propose and realize experimentally two protocols to probe the long tails of the Floquet eigenfunctions and identify a scaling transition between long-range and short-range couplings. Our paper offers a useful benchmark of pulse engineering and opens the route towards quantum simulations of rich nonequilibrium effects.