2021 Valley Prize Talk: Many-Body Physics in the NISQ Era

This talk will explore the implications of recent breakthough progress in the realm of noisy, intermediate scale quantum (NISQ) devices for quantum many-body physics. We ask which physical phenomena, in the realm of quantum statistical mechanics, can these devices realize better than any other experimental platform. As a target, we identify discrete time crystals (DTCs), novel out-of-equilibrium phases of matter that break time translation symmetry. While precursors of time-crystals have been observed across a variety of experimental platforms - ranging from trapped ions to nitrogen vacancy centers - each of these lacks one or more of the necessary ingredients for realizing a true incarnation of this phase, and detecting the long-range spatiotemporal order that is its defining feature. We show that a new generation of quantum simulators, such as Google's Sycamore processor, can be programmed to realize the DTC phase and to experimentally verify its dynamical properties using a wide range of observables and initial states. We will also present recent results on the study of many-body dynamics in open systems, which is broadly relevant for understanding the effect of environmental decoherence on the observation of novel physics and computational advantage.