Probing Kitaev's honeycomb model with digital quantum simulations based on reconfigurable atom arrays

We develop and experimentally implement a digital quantum simulation architecture for Kitaev’s anisotropic spin model on a honeycomb lattice based on reconfigurable atom arrays. Our approach relies on an initial stabilizer state prepared in constant depth with feed-forward operations. The system’s evolution is realized with tunable entangling phase gates interspersed with atom motion. With this approach, we explore the phase diagram of the spin model itself and in the process realize a gapped non-Abelian spin liquid phase which we probe by measuring a topological invariant. We investigate the system dynamics of 72 fermion sites under an effective Floquet Hamiltonian with more than a thousand entangling gates, and employ several error-detection techniques to improve the signal quality. We further use this system for hardware efficient simulations of two-dimensional fermionic models. Our approach enables direct experimental explorations of the Kitaev model and pave the way for hardware-efficient digital quantum simulations of complex fermionic models.