Non-equilibrium quantum domain reconfiguration dynamics in a two-dimensional electronic crystal and a quantum annealer

Abstract

Relaxation dynamics of complex many-body quantum systems trapped into metastable states is a very active field of research from both the theoretical and experimental point of view with implications in a wide array of topics from macroscopic quantum tunnelling and nucleosynthesis to non-equilibrium superconductivity and energy-efficient memory devices. In this work, we investigate quantum domain reconfiguration dynamics in the electronic superlattice of a quantum material using time-resolved scanning tunneling microscopy and unveil a crossover from temperature to noisy quantum fluctuation dominated dynamics. The process is modeled using a programmable superconducting quantum annealer in which qubit interconnections correspond directly to the microscopic interactions between electrons in the quantum material. Crucially, the dynamics of both the experiment and quantum simulation is driven by spectrally similar pink noise. We find that the simulations reproduce the emergent time evolution and temperature dependence of the experimentally observed electronic domain dynamics.