Observing Conformal Floquet Dynamics on a Digital Quantum Processor

@misc{mo2026observing,
  title = {{Observing Conformal Floquet Dynamics on a Digital Quantum Processor}},
  author = {Liang-Hong Mo and Bastien Lapierre and Qiang Miao},
  howpublished = {arXiv},
  year = {2026},
  month = sep,
  doi = {10.48550/arxiv.2605.27530},
  eprint = {2605.27530},
  archivePrefix = {arXiv},
  url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.27530},
}

TY  - UNPB
TI  - Observing Conformal Floquet Dynamics on a Digital Quantum Processor
AU  - Liang-Hong Mo
AU  - Bastien Lapierre
AU  - Qiang Miao
PY  - 2026
DA  - 2026/09/14
PB  - arXiv
DO  - 10.48550/arxiv.2605.27530
UR  - https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.27530
AB  - Quantum simulations are traditionally confined to exploring dynamics starting from unentangled or low-entanglement states due to severe bottlenecks in protocol design, hardware performance, and classical verification. Here, we report the first quantum simulation of non-equilibrium dynamics initiated directly from a many-body critical ground state. Using a fully-connected trapped-ion processor, we prepare the critical ground state of a transverse-field Ising model via a hardware-tailored, logarithmic-depth quantum circuit based on multi-scale entanglement renormalization. Following this initialization, we apply a deep Floquet drive that maintains emergent conformal symmetry, enabling us to benchmark lattice dynamics against analytical results from continuum theory. In the resulting conformal heating phase, we extract a central charge consistent with the Ising universality class (c=1/2) from the universal decay of the Loschmidt echo and observe spatial energy localization predicted by field theory. Conversely, the non-heating phase exhibits global finite-time revivals. This work establishes a scalable and versatile framework for exploring critical quantum dynamics.
ER  -