Analog quantum simulation of Shastry-Sutherland Ising materials
Abstract
Frustrated magnets host rich emergent behavior because competing interactions generate dense manifolds of low-energy states. The Ising Shastry-Sutherland model is a paradigmatic setting, motivated experimentally by Ising-like rare-earth tetraborides such as TmB4 and ErB4, whose field-induced magnetization plateaus have motivated extensive microscopic modeling. Yet how tunable quantum fluctuations reorganize this material-motivated phase diagram remains largely unexplored. Here, we realize a transverse- and longitudinal-field Ising model on the Shastry-Sutherland lattice using a programmable Rydberg-atom array. We map its quantum phase diagram using density matrix renormalization group calculations and probe corresponding signatures experimentally in arrays containing more than 110 atoms. Beyond the established classical phases, the calculations identify two regimes absent in the classical limit and stabilized at finite transverse field: a 2/5 filling plateau whose finite stability region emerges from a classically degenerate phase boundary and a symmetry-preserving quantum-dimer regime replacing classically selected collinear order. Experiments on finite open arrays reveal signatures consistent with these regimes across three boundary-pinning conditions, with the resulting response maps agreeing qualitatively with the calculated phase diagram. Our results establish programmable Rydberg-atom arrays as tools for exploring frustrated, material-motivated Hamiltonians and motivate searches for new, quantum-driven magnetization plateaus and quantum-dimer behavior in ErB4 under a transverse field or in strain-tuned TmB4.
Related
- Accurate ground-state entropies from population Monte Carlo: The antiferromagnetic Ising model on the Shastry-Sutherland lattice
- On the precise boundary of the Néel antiferromagnetic phase in the Shastry-Sutherland model
- Stripe antiferromagnetic order and spin dynamics in the Shastry-Sutherland Ising compound Er2Be2GeO7
- Unifying Dirac spin liquids on square and Shastry–Sutherland lattices via fermionic deconfined criticality
- Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya interactions in the SU(2) gauge theory of the Shastry-Sutherland Dirac spin liquids
BibTeX
@misc{mkhitaryan2026analog,
title = {{Analog quantum simulation of Shastry-Sutherland Ising materials}},
author = {Vahagn Mkhitaryan and Milan Kornjača and Mao Lin and Alexander Schuckert and Majd Hamdan and Sergio H. Cantú and Ammar Ali and Tommaso Macrí and Nathan Gemelke and Alexander Keesling and Peter Komar and Travis S. Humble and Alexei Bylinski and Pedro L. S. Lopes and Fangli Liu and Alexandra Boltasseva and Mikhail D. Lukin and Arnab Banerjee and Vladimir M. Shalaev and Sheng-Tao Wang},
howpublished = {arXiv},
year = {2026},
month = oct,
doi = {10.48550/arxiv.2610.12800},
eprint = {2610.12800},
archivePrefix = {arXiv},
url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.12800},
}
RIS
TY - UNPB
TI - Analog quantum simulation of Shastry-Sutherland Ising materials
AU - Vahagn Mkhitaryan
AU - Milan Kornjača
AU - Mao Lin
AU - Alexander Schuckert
AU - Majd Hamdan
AU - Sergio H. Cantú
AU - Ammar Ali
AU - Tommaso Macrí
AU - Nathan Gemelke
AU - Alexander Keesling
AU - Peter Komar
AU - Travis S. Humble
AU - Alexei Bylinski
AU - Pedro L. S. Lopes
AU - Fangli Liu
AU - Alexandra Boltasseva
AU - Mikhail D. Lukin
AU - Arnab Banerjee
AU - Vladimir M. Shalaev
AU - Sheng-Tao Wang
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/10/08
PB - arXiv
DO - 10.48550/arxiv.2610.12800
UR - https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.12800
AB - Frustrated magnets host rich emergent behavior because competing interactions generate dense manifolds of low-energy states. The Ising Shastry-Sutherland model is a paradigmatic setting, motivated experimentally by Ising-like rare-earth tetraborides such as TmB_4 and ErB_4, whose field-induced magnetization plateaus have motivated extensive microscopic modeling. Yet how tunable quantum fluctuations reorganize this material-motivated phase diagram remains largely unexplored. Here, we realize a transverse- and longitudinal-field Ising model on the Shastry-Sutherland lattice using a programmable Rydberg-atom array. We map its quantum phase diagram using density matrix renormalization group calculations and probe corresponding signatures experimentally in arrays containing more than 110 atoms. Beyond the established classical phases, the calculations identify two regimes absent in the classical limit and stabilized at finite transverse field: a 2/5 filling plateau whose finite stability region emerges from a classically degenerate phase boundary and a symmetry-preserving quantum-dimer regime replacing classically selected collinear order. Experiments on finite open arrays reveal signatures consistent with these regimes across three boundary-pinning conditions, with the resulting response maps agreeing qualitatively with the calculated phase diagram. Our results establish programmable Rydberg-atom arrays as tools for exploring frustrated, material-motivated Hamiltonians and motivate searches for new, quantum-driven magnetization plateaus and quantum-dimer behavior in ErB_4 under a transverse field or in strain-tuned TmB_4.
ER -