Abstract

The prevailing view is that quantum phenomena can be leveraged to tackle certain problems beyond the reach of classical approaches. Recent years have witnessed significant progress in this direction; in particular, superconducting qubits have emerged as one of the leading platforms for quantum simulation and computation on Noisy Intermediate-Scale Quantum (NISQ) processors. This progress is exemplified by research ranging from the foundations of quantum mechanics [1] to the non-equilibrium dynamics of elementary excitations [2] and condensed matter physics [3,4]. By utilizing the contextuality of quantum measurements to solve a 2D hidden linear function problem, we demonstrate a quantum advantage through a computational separation for up to 105 qubits on these bounded-resource tasks [1]. Motivated by high-energy physics, we image charge and string dynamics in (2+1)D lattice gauge theories [2], revealing two distinct regimes within the confining phase: a weak-confinement regime with strong transverse string fluctuations and a strong-confinement regime where these fluctuations are suppressed. Turning to condensed matter, we observe novel localization in one- and two-dimensional many-body systems that lack energy diffusion despite being disorder-free and translationally invariant [3]. Additionally, we show that strong disorder in interacting multi-level landscapes can induce superfluidity characterized by long-range phase coherence [4]. Together, these results show that NISQ processors, even without fault tolerance, are powerful tools for probing and advancing our understanding of complex non-equilibrium quantum dynamics.

[1] S. Kumar et al., arxiv.org/abs/2512.02284

[2] Cochran et al., Nature 642, 315–320 (2025)

[3] Gyawali et al., arxiv.org/abs/2410.06557

[4] Ticea et al., arxiv.org/abs/2512.21416