Benchmarking dynamical-structure-factor protocols in programmable neutral-atom geometries

Abstract

The dynamical structure factor is a central observable in condensed-matter physics, providing direct insight into the excitation spectrum and dynamical response of quantum materials. While it is traditionally accessed in real materials through inelastic neutron scattering, recent works have shown that analogous information can be extracted in quantum simulators using suitable dynamical protocols. So far, these approaches have been demonstrated mainly in paradigmatic integrable one-dimensional models. In this work, we use numerical emulations of a neutral-atom quantum processing unit to assess the feasibility of measuring the dynamical structure factor in a broader class of Ising-like spin systems. Beyond the standard one-dimensional transverse-field Ising chain, we benchmark the protocol in chains with dimerized interactions and in the two-dimensional transverse-field Ising model, where spectral properties are difficult to access with classical numerical methods at large scales. We further analyze the robustness of the protocol under realistic experimental conditions, including finite simulation times, pulse modulation, positional disorder, and laser noise. Our results show that neutral-atom quantum simulators can provide a practical route to probing dynamical response functions in regimes where classical simulations become increasingly demanding, paving the way toward experimental implementation.