Fig. 5: Two-component strongly interacting fermions.

a, Two independent species of fermions, labelled ‘spin up’ and ‘spin down’, are realized by dividing the system into two halves. The XX and YY links across the boundary are turned off to facilitate independent hopping dynamics; this system realizes a 4 × 4 lattice with two fermion species. b, Floquet evolution consists of independent hopping within the two halves followed by density–density interactions between the two spin states. c, The interactions are realized through a parallel entangling operation connecting the two halves of the system. Two parallel CNOT gates propagate a ZZ(θ) operator, applied to the spin-up half, into the interaction term. d, The initial state is a chequerboard pattern, staggered between the two fermion spin states with mean magnetization denoted by the colour bar. e, Staggered magnetization dynamics during a quench with and without the interactions. f, Final staggered magnetization as a function of interaction strength. Increasing interactions suppress the spin mixing dynamics. The solid lines are the result of noisy numerical simulations of the circuit (Methods). Error bars represent 68% confidence intervals.