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1. Digital quantum simulation of Floquet symmetry-protected topological phases

   https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-022-04854-3  

   Zhang, Xu; Jiang, Wenjie; Deng, Jinfeng; Wang, Ke; Chen, Jiachen; Zhang, Pengfei; Ren, Wenhui; Dong, Hang; Xu, Shibo; Gao, Yu; et al (July 2022, Nature)

   Abstract Quantum many-body systems away from equilibrium host a rich variety of exotic phenomena that are forbidden by equilibrium thermodynamics. A prominent example is that of discrete time crystals 1–8 , in which time-translational symmetry is spontaneously broken in periodically driven systems. Pioneering experiments have observed signatures of time crystalline phases with trapped ions 9,10 , solid-state spin systems 11–15 , ultracold atoms 16,17 and superconducting qubits 18–20 . Here we report the observation of a distinct type of non-equilibrium state of matter, Floquet symmetry-protected topological phases, which are implemented through digital quantum simulation with an array of programmable superconducting qubits. We observe robust long-lived temporal correlations and subharmonic temporal response for the edge spins over up to 40 driving cycles using a circuit of depth exceeding 240 and acting on 26 qubits. We demonstrate that the subharmonic response is independent of the initial state, and experimentally map out a phase boundary between the Floquet symmetry-protected topological and thermal phases. Our results establish a versatile digital simulation approach to exploring exotic non-equilibrium phases of matter with current noisy intermediate-scale quantum processors 21 . 

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2. Topological zero modes and edge symmetries of metastable Markovian bosonic systems

   https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevB.108.214312  

   Flynn, Vincent P; Cobanera, Emilio; Viola, Lorenza (December 2023, Physical Review B)

   Tight bosonic analogs of free-fermionic symmetry-protected topological phases, and their associated edgelocalized excitations, have long evaded the grasp of condensed-matter and AMO physics. In this paper, building on our initial exploration [Phys. Rev. Lett. 127, 245701 (2021)], we identify a broad class of quadratic bosonic systems subject to Markovian dissipation that realize tight bosonic analogs of the Majorana and Dirac edge modes characteristic of topological superconductors and insulators, respectively. To this end, we establish a general framework for topological metastability for these systems, by leveraging pseudospectral theory as the appropriate mathematical tool for capturing the nonnormality of the Lindbladian generator. The resulting dynamical paradigm, which is characterized by both a sharp separation between transient and asymptotic dynamics and a nontrivial topological invariant, is shown to host edge-localized modes, which we dub Majorana and Dirac bosons. Generically, such modes consist of one conserved mode and a canonically conjugate generator of an approximate phase-space translation symmetry of the dynamics. The general theory is exemplified through several representative models exhibiting the full range of exotic boundary physics that topologically metastable systems can engender. In particular, we explore the extent to which Noether’s theorem is violated in this dissipative setting and the way in which certain symmetries can nontrivially modify the edge modes. Notably, we also demonstrate the possibility of anomalous parity dynamics for a bosonic cat state prepared in a topologically metastable system, whereby an equal distribution between even and odd parity sectors is sustained over a long transient. For both Majorana and Dirac bosons, observable multitime signatures in the form of anomalously long-lived quantum correlations and divergent zero-frequency power spectral peaks are proposed and discussed in detail. Our results point to a paradigm for symmetry-protected topological physics in free bosons, embedded deeply in the long-lived transient regimes of metastable dynamics. 

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3. Topological Stabilizer Models on Continuous Variables

   https://doi.org/10.1103/spsy-3k8q  

   Magdalena_de_la_Fuente, Julio C; Ellison, Tyler D; Cheng, Meng; Williamson, Dominic J (March 2026, Physical Review X)

   We construct a family of two-dimensional topological stabilizer codes on continuous variable (CV) degrees of freedom, which generalize homological rotor codes and the toric-GKP code. Our topological codes are built using the concept of boson condensation—we start from a parent stabilizer code based on an R gauge theory and condense various bosonic excitations. This produces a large class of topological CV stabilizer codes, including ones that are characterized by the anyon theories of U(1)_{2n} x U(1)_{-2m} Chern-Simons theories, for arbitrary pairs of positive integers (n,m). Most notably, this includes anyon theories that are nonchiral and nevertheless do not admit a gapped boundary. It is widely believed that such anyon theories cannot be realized by any stabilizer model on finite-dimensional systems. We conjecture that these CV codes go beyond codes obtained from concatenating a topological qudit code with a local encoding into CVs, and thus constitute the first example of topological codes that are intrinsic to CV systems. Moreover, we study the Hamiltonians associated with the topological CV stabilizer codes and show that, although they have a gapless spectrum, they can become gapped with the addition of a quadratic perturbation. We show that similar methods can be used to construct a gapped Hamiltonian whose anyon theory agrees with a U(1)_2 Chern-Simons theory. Our work initiates the study of scalable stabilizer codes that are intrinsic to CV systems and highlights how error-correcting codes can be used to design and analyze many-body systems of CVs that model lattice gauge theories. 

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4. Higher-group symmetry in finite gauge theory and stabilizer codes

   https://doi.org/10.21468/SciPostPhys.16.4.089  

   Barkeshli, Maissam; Chen, Yu-An; Hsin, Po-Shen; Kobayashi, Ryohei (January 2024, SciPost Physics)

   A large class of gapped phases of matter can be described by topological finite group gauge theories. In this paper, we show how such gauge theories possess a higher-group global symmetry, which we study in detail. We derive thed $d$-group global symmetry and its ’t Hooft anomaly for topological finite group gauge theories in(d+1) $(d+1)$space-time dimensions, including non-Abelian gauge groups and Dijkgraaf-Witten twists. We focus on the 1-form symmetry generated by invertible (Abelian) magnetic defects and the higher-form symmetries generated by invertible topological defects decorated with lower dimensional gauged symmetry-protected topological (SPT) phases. We show that due to a generalization of the Witten effect and charge-flux attachment, the 1-form symmetry generated by the magnetic defects mixes with other symmetries into a higher group. We describe such higher-group symmetry in various lattice model examples. We discuss several applications, including the classification of fermionic SPT phases in (3+1)D for general fermionic symmetry groups, where we also derive a simpler formula for the[O_5] ∈ H^5(BG, U(1)) $\left[O_5\right]\in H^5(BG,U\left(1\right))$obstruction that has appeared in prior work. We also show how thed $d$-group symmetry is related to fault-tolerant non-Pauli logical gates and a refined Clifford hierarchy in stabilizer codes. We discover new logical gates in stabilizer codes using thed $d$-group symmetry, such as a controlled Z gate in the (3+1) D\mathbb{Z}_2 ${\mathbb{Z}}_2$toric code. 

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5. Decoupling the electronic gap from the spin Chern number in spin-resolved topological insulators

   https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevB.110.214211  

   Tyner, Alexander C; Grindall, Cormac; Pixley, J H (December 2024, Physical Review B)

   In two-dimensional topological insulators, a disorder-induced topological phase transition is typically identified with an Anderson localization transition at the Fermi energy. However, in ${\mathbb{Z}}_2$trivial, spin-resolved topological insulators it is the spectral gap of the spin spectrum, in addition to the bulk mobility gap, which protects the nontrivial topology of the ground state. In this work, we show that these two gaps, the bulk electronic and spin gap, can evolve distinctly on the introduction of quenched short-ranged disorder and that an odd-quantized spin Chern number topologically protects states below the Fermi energy from localization. This decoupling leads to a unique situation in which an Anderson localization transition occurs below the Fermi energy at the topological transition. Furthermore, the presence of topologically protected extended bulk states nontrivial bulk topology typically implies the existence of protected boundary modes. We demonstrate the absence of protected boundary modes in the Hamiltonian and yet the edge modes in the eigenstates of the projected spin operator survive. Our work thus provides evidence that a nonzero spin-Chern number, in the absence of a nontrivial ${\mathbb{Z}}_2$index, does not demand the existence of protected boundary modes at finite or zero energy. Published by the American Physical Society2024 

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