Experimental demonstration of a digital quantum simulation of a general PT -symmetric system

Abstract

PT-symmetric systems are one of the most interesting research fields in modern quantum physics, where various theoretical and experimental progress has been made. In our work, we experimentally demonstrate how to realize a general PT-symmetric two-level operation in a quantum computation frame with a universal circuit model. It is based on enlarging the system with ancillary qubits and encoding the subsystem with the non-Hermitian Hamiltonian with postselection. Furthermore, we use the general formula to demonstrate one particular interesting issue, entanglement restoration induced by local PT-symmetric operation in our four-qubit liquid nuclear magnetic resonance platform, and a theoretical explanation for the physical characteristics has been proposed. We also extend the protocol to the realization of an arbitrary two-level Hamiltonian evolution without a Hermitian restriction by an appropriate modification of the original quantum circuit. Our work lays the foundation for quantum simulation of the general PT-symmetric problem in realistic quantum simulators, and the scheme can be extended to other quantum computation platforms.