Emulating Thouless pumping in the interacting Rice−Mele model using superconducting qutrits

Abstract

The Rice−Mele model has been a seminal prototypical model for the study of topological phenomena such as Thouless pumping. Here we implement the interacting Rice−Mele model using a superconducting quantum processor comprising a one-dimensional array of 36 qutrits. By adiabatically cycling the qutrit frequencies and hopping strengths in the parametric space, we emulate the Thouless pumping of single and two bounded microwave photons along the qutrit chain. Furthermore, with strong Hubbard interaction inherent in the qutrits we also emulate the intriguing phenomena of resonant tunneling and asymmetric edge-state transport of two interacting photons. Utilizing the interactions and higher energy levels in such fully controlled synthetic quantum simulators, these results demonstrate new opportunities for exploring exotic topological phases and quantum transport phenomena using superconducting quantum circuits.

Graphical abstract

Keywords

quantum simulation / superconducting quantum circuits / superconducting qutrits / Thouless pumping

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Declarations

The authors declare that they have no competing interests and there are no conflicts.

Electronic supplementary materials

The online version contains supplementary material available at https://doi.org/10.15302/frontphys.2025.033202.

Acknowledgements

We thank Xiongjun Liu, Yucheng Wang, Dawei Lu, and Benchuan Lin for helpful discussions. This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Nos. 12174178, 11905098, 12204228, 12374474, 12025509, and 12275365), the Key-Area Research and Development Program of Guangdong Province (No. 2018B030326001), the Guangdong Provincial Key Laboratory (No. 2019B121203002), the Science, Technology and Innovation Commission of Shenzhen Municipality (Nos. KYTDPT20181011104202253, KQTD20210811090049034, and K21547502), the Innovation Program for Quantum Science and Technology (No. 2021ZD0301703), the Shenzhen−Hong Kong Cooperation Zone for Technology and Innovation (No. HZQB-KCZYB-2020050), the NSF of Beijing (No. Z190012), and the National Key Research and Development Program of China (Nos. 2022YFA1404104 and 2024A1515011714).

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