Abstract
Quantum circuits with local unitaries offer a platform to explore many-body quantum dynamics in discrete time. Their locality makes them suitable for current processors, but verification at scale is difficult for non-integrable systems. Here we study dual-unitary circuits, which are maximally chaotic yet permit exact analytical solutions for certain correlation functions. Using improved noise-learning and error-mitigation methods, we show that a superconducting quantum processor with 91 qubits is able to accurately simulate these correlators. We then perturb the circuits away from the dual-unitary point and benchmark the dynamics against tensor-network simulations. These results establish error-mitigated digital quantum simulation on pre-fault-tolerant processors as a reliable tool to explore emergent quantum many-body phases.
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Data availability
The datasets generated and analysed during this study are available via Figshare at https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.29069759 (ref. 60).
Code availability
Code for tensor-network simulations of the noiseless quantum circuits is available via Figshare at https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.29069759 (ref. 60).
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Acknowledgements
A.E., Y.K. and A.K. thank S. Bravyi for introducing DU circuits to them. M.A.C.R., Z.Z., G.G.P. and J.G. thank L. Piroli for useful discussions. We thank R. Malik for enabling device access. We thank A. Seif, D. Layden, E. van den Berg and L. Govia for feedback on the manuscript. I.T., F.T. and L.E.F. thank S. Wörner, A. Carrera Vázquez and D. Egger for helpful discussions. M.L., D.F., M.A.C.R., F.P., B.S., Z.Z., S.M., J.G., G.G.-P. and S.N.F. are grateful to E.-M. Borrelli, D. Cavalcanti, S. Mangini, M. Cattaneo, K. Korhonen, H. Vappula and J. Malmi for helpful discussions. We acknowledge the EuroHPC Joint Undertaking for awarding us the projects EHPC-DEV-2024D04-042, providing access to Leonardo at CINECA, Italy, and EHPC-DEV-2023D08-016, providing access to Karolina at IT4Innovations, Czech Republic. L.E.F. acknowledges funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement no. 955479 (MOQS – Molecular Quantum Simulations). I.T. acknowledges support from NCCR MARVEL, funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation. S.D. acknowledges support through the SFI-IRC Pathway Grant 22/PATH-S/10812. J.G. is supported by a Royal Society University Research Fellowship and thanks S. Pappalardi for inspirational discussions.
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The Algorithmiq team (M.L., D.F., M.A.C.R., F.P., B.S., Z.Z., S.M., J.G., G.G.P. and S.N.F.) led the design and implementation of TEM and TN simulations. The IBM Quantum team (L.E.F., A.E., N.K., Y.K., A.H., F.T., I.T. and A.K.) led the experimental implementation, noise characterization and the hardware calibrations. L.E.F. performed the experiments with support from the IBM team. M.L. implemented the TEM with support from the Algorithmiq team, D.F. implemented the tensor-network simulations with support from the Algorithmiq team. S.N.F. and G.G.-P. conceived TEM. The Algorithmiq, TCD (M.L., N.K., S.D. and J.G.) and IBM teams contributed to the design of the experiments, circuits and tensor-network simulations, as well as data analysis and paper writing.
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Fischer, L.E., Leahy, M., Eddins, A. et al. Dynamical simulations of many-body quantum chaos on a quantum computer. Nat. Phys. (2026). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41567-025-03144-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41567-025-03144-9
