Simulating the dynamical quantum Hall effect with superconducting qubits

Abstract

We propose an experimental scheme to simulate the dynamical quantum Hall effect and the related interaction-induced topological transition with a superconducting-qubit array. We show that a one-dimensional Heisenberg model with tunable parameters can be realized in an array of superconducting qubits. The quantized plateau, which is a feature of the dynamical quantum Hall effect, will emerge in the Berry curvature of the superconducting qubits as a function of the coupling strength between nearest-neighbor qubits. We numerically calculate the Berry curvatures of two-, four-, and six-qubit arrays and find that the interaction-induced topological transition can be easily observed with the simplest two-qubit array. Furthermore, we analyze some practical conditions in typical experiments for observing this dynamical quantum Hall effect.