An entangling Hubbard quasiparticle collider on a digital quantum processor

Abstract

Scattering of quasiparticles provides direct access to the interactions that govern strongly correlated systems. In this work, we realize the quasiparticle scattering experiment of the Fermi-Hubbard model on a digital quantum processor by colliding a doublon and a holon in the half-filled chain of 21 sites encoded on 42 qubits of the ibm_boston processor. For the first time, we measure the transmission probability of quasiparticles of the Hubbard model on quantum hardware, which agrees with the Bethe-ansatz scattering matrix without free parameters. Beyond the scattering probabilities, the collision generates entanglement by superposing the transmitted and reflected components, which we infer from the particle-number fluctuation. In sharp contrast, a control collision between two doublons shows neither the interaction dependence nor the number fluctuation, as expected for indistinguishable particles. Our work demonstrates that the ability to create quasiparticles of a chosen flavor on demand and program their motion and interactions makes a digital quantum processor a new experimental toolset for probing the entanglement structure generated by quasiparticle scattering.