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Abstract Using experiments and theory, we investigate the behavior of nonlinear acoustic modes in a physical system composed of an array of three coupled acoustic waveguides, two of which are externally driven with two different frequencies. Nonlinear modes with frequency given by linear combinations of the driving frequencies are realizations of so-called logical phi-bits. A phi-bit is a two-state degree of freedom of an acoustic wave, which can be in a coherent superposition of states with complex amplitude coefficients, i.e., a qubit analogue. We demonstrate experimentally that phi-bit modes are supported in the array of waveguides. Using perturbation theory, we show that phi-bits may result from the intrinsic nonlinearity of the material used to couple the waveguides. We have also isolated possible effects on phi-bit states associated with the systems’ electronics, transducers and ultrasonic coupling agents used to probe the array and that may introduce extrinsic nonlinearities. These extrinsic effects are shown to be easily separable from the intrinsic behavior. The intrinsic behavior includes sharp jumps in phi-bit phases occurring over very narrow ranges of driving frequency. These jumps may also exhibit hysteretic behavior dependent on the direction of driving frequency tuning. The intrinsic states of phi-bits and multiple nonlinearly correlated phi-bits may serve as foundation for robust and practical quantum-analogue information technologies. 

Logical phi-bits are nonlinear acoustic modes analogous to qubits and supported by an externally driven acoustic metastructure. A correspondence is established between the state of three correlated logical phi-bits represented in a low-dimensional linearly scaling physical space and their state representation as a complex vector in a high-dimensional exponentially scaling Hilbert space. We show the experimental implementation of a nontrivial three phi-bit unitary operation analogous to a quantum circuit. This three phi-bit gate operates in parallel on the components of the three phi-bit complex state vector. While this operation would be challenging to perform in one step on a quantum computer, by comparison, ours requires only a single physical action on the metastructure. 

Abstract We present a model of an externally driven acoustic metamaterial constituted of a nonlinear parallel array of coupled acoustic waveguides that supports logical phi-bits, classical analogues of quantum bits (qubit). Descriptions of correlated multiple phi-bit systems emphasize the importance of representations of phi-bit and multiple phi-bit vector states within the context of their corresponding Hilbert space. Experimental data are used to demonstrate the realization of the single phi-bit Hadamard gate and the phase shift gate. A three phi-bit system is also used to illustrate the development of multiple phi-bit gates as well as a simple quantum-like algorithm. These demonstrations set the stage for the implementation of a digital quantum analogue computing platform based on acoustic metamaterial that can implement quantum-like gates and may offer promise as an efficient platform for the simulation of materials.