Creating Compressible Many-Body States of Light through Adiabatic Tuning of Disorder

Creating a desired many-body state within large quantum systems is a common desire among several related fields, ranging from quantum information science to many-body physics and quantum metrology. In this work we demonstrate state preparation using a low-complexity technique by combining two common methods: step-by-step assembly and adiabatic evo- lution, to create low-entropy quantum many-body fluids of light. These fluid-like states of light are generated on our Bose-Hubbard chain of flux-tunable transmon qubits. By tuning the on-site energies of each qubit we start in a disordered lattice where the eigenstates are known and localized to single sites (qubits). We create individual excitations, then adiabati- cally remove the disorder allowing quantum fluctuations to melt the localized photons into a fluid. We first benchmark this lattice melting technique by building and characterizing arbi- trary single particle-in-a-box states, then assemble multi-particle strongly correlated fluids. Inter-site entanglement measurements indicate that the particles in the fluid delocalize, while two-body density correlation measurements demonstrate that they also avoid one another, revealing Friedel oscillations characteristic of a Tonks-Girardeau gas. This work opens new possibilities for preparation of topological and otherwise exotic phases of synthetic matter.