Probing Defects with Quantum Simulator Snapshots
Creators
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1.
University of California, Santa Barbara
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2.
California Institute of Technology
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3.
University of Waterloo
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4.
Perimeter Institute
Abstract
Snapshots—i.e., projective measurements of local degrees of freedom—are the most standard data taken in experiments on quantum simulators, usually to probe local physics. In this Letter we propose a simple protocol to experimentally probe physics of defects with these snapshots. Our protocol relies only on snapshots from the bulk system, without introducing the defect explicitly; as such, the physics of different kinds of defects can be probed using the same dataset. In particular, we demonstrate that, with snapshots of local spin configurations of, for example, the 1𝑑 Rydberg atom realization of the quantum Ising criticality, we can (1) extract the “defect entropy” and (2) access the continuous line of fixed points of effective defect conformal field theory.
Copyright and License
© 2026 American Physical Society.
Acknowledgement
We thank Ejaaz Merali and Shaeer Moeed for developing and providing us with the SSE code for the Ising and Rydberg Array models used to generate the data in this work; it can be found at [64]. We also thank Timothy Hsieh, David Mross, Sara Murciano, Stephen Naus, Pablo Sala, Xiangkai Sun, and Yijian Zou for helpful discussions. C. X. and A. S. are supported by the Simons Foundation through the Simons Investigator program. R. G. M. acknowledges support from NSERC and the Perimeter Institute. Research at Perimeter is supported in part by the Government of Canada through the Department of Innovation, Science and Economic Development Canada, and the Province of Ontario through the Ministry of Economic Development, Job Creation and Trade. The U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Science, National Quantum Information Science Research Centers, Quantum Science Center partially supported the sample complexity analysis of this work.
Data Availability
The data that support the findings of this article are not publicly available upon publication because it is not technically feasible and/or the cost of preparing, depositing, and hosting the data would be prohibitive within the terms of this research project. The data are available from the authors upon reasonable request.
Supplemental Material
Additional derivations and data. Five additional figures.
Files
stk3-lm78.pdf
Additional details
Related works
- Is new version of
- Discussion Paper: arXiv:2507.05379 (arXiv)
Funding
- Simons Foundation
- Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council
- Perimeter Institute
- Government of Canada
- Innovation, Science and Economic Development Canada
- Ontario Ministry of Economic Development and Innovation
- United States Department of Energy
- National Quantum Information Science Research Centers
Dates
- Submitted
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2025-08-07
- Accepted
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2026-01-02
Caltech Custom Metadata
- Caltech groups
- Institute for Quantum Information and Matter , Walter Burke Institute for Theoretical Physics , Division of Physics, Mathematics and Astronomy (PMA) , Physics Department
- Publication Status
- Published