Current noisy intermediate-scale quantum (NISQ) devices constitute powerful platforms for analog quantum simulation. The exquisite level of control offered by state-of-the-art quantum computers make them especially promising to implement time-dependent Hamiltonians. We implement quasiperiodic driving of a single qubit in the IBM Quantum Experience and thus experimentally realize a temporal version of the half-Bernevig-Hughes-Zhang Chern insulator. Using simple error mitigation, we achieve consistently high fidelities of around 97%. From our data we can infer the presence of a topological transition, thus realizing an earlier proposal of topological frequency conversion by Martin, Refael, and Halperin. Motivated by these results, we theoretically study the many-qubit case, and show that one can implement a wide class of Floquet Hamiltonians, or time-dependent Hamiltonians in general. Our study highlights promises and limitations when studying many-body systems through multifrequency driving of quantum computers.

• Received 11 December 2020
• Revised 1 March 2021
• Accepted 22 March 2021

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevLett.126.163602

Published by the American Physical Society under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license. Further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the published article’s title, journal citation, and DOI. Open access publication funded by the Max Planck Society.

Published by the American Physical Society