Observation of the non-Hermitian skin effect and Fermi skin on a digital quantum computer

Abstract

Non-Hermitian physics has attracted considerable attention in recent years, particularly the non-Hermitian skin effect (NHSE) for its extreme sensitivity and non-locality. While the NHSE has been physically observed in various classical metamaterials and even ultracold atomic arrays, its highly-nontrivial implications in many-body dynamics have never been experimentally investigated. In this work, we report the first observation of the NHSE on a universal quantum processor, as well as its characteristic but elusive Fermi skin from many-fermion statistics. To implement NHSE dynamics on a quantum computer, the effective time-evolution circuit not only needs to be non-reciprocal and non-unitary but must also be scaled up to a sufficient number of lattice qubits to achieve spatial non-locality. We show how such a non-unitary operation can be systematically realized by post-selecting multiple ancilla qubits, as demonstrated through two paradigmatic non-reciprocal models on a noisy IBM quantum processor, with clear signatures of asymmetric spatial propagation and many-body Fermi skin accumulation. To minimize errors from inevitable device noise, time evolution is performed using a trainable, optimized quantum circuit produced with variational quantum algorithms. Our study represents a critical milestone in the quantum simulation of non-Hermitian lattice phenomena on present-day quantum computers and can be readily generalized to more sophisticated many-body models with the remarkable programmability of quantum computers.