Probing the many-body localization phase transition with superconducting circuits

Abstract

Chains of superconducting circuit devices provide a natural platform for studies of synthetic bosonic quantum matter. Motivated by the recent experimental progress in realizing disordered and interacting chains of superconducting transmon devices, we study the bosonic many-body localization phase transition using the methods of exact diagonalization as well as matrix product state dynamics. We estimate the location of transition separating the ergodic and the many-body localized phases as a function of the disorder strength and the many-body on-site interaction strength. The main difference between the bosonic model realized by superconducting circuits and similar fermionic model is that the effect of the on-site interaction is stronger due to the possibility of multiple excitations occupying the same site. The phase transition is found to be robust upon including longer-range hopping and interaction terms present in the experiments. Furthermore, we calculate experimentally relevant local observables and show that their temporal fluctuations can be used to distinguish between the dynamics of Anderson insulator, many-body localization, and delocalized phases. While we consider unitary dynamics, neglecting the effects of dissipation, decoherence and measurement back action, the timescales on which the dynamics is unitary are sufficient for observation of characteristic dynamics in the many-body localized phase. Moreover, the experimentally available disorder strength and interactions allow for tuning the many-body localization phase transition, thus making the arrays of superconducting circuit devices a promising platform for exploring localization physics and phase transition.