Topological prethermal strong zero modes on superconducting processors
- Feitong Jin
- Si Jiang
- Xuhao Zhu
- Zehang Bao
- Fanhao Shen
- Ke Wang
- Zitian Zhu
- Shibo Xu
- Zixuan Song
- Jiachen Chen
- Ziqi Tan
- Yaozu Wu
- Chuanyu Zhang
- Yu Gao
- Ning Wang
- Yiren Zou
- Aosai Zhang
- Tingting Li
- Jiarun Zhong
- Zhengyi Cui
- Yihang Han
- Yiyang He
- Han Wang
- Jia-Nan Yang
- Yanzhe Wang
- Jiayuan Shen
- Gongyu Liu
- Jinfeng Deng
- Hang Dong
- Pengfei Zhang
- Weikang Li
- Dong Yuan
- Zhide Lu
- Zheng-Zhi Sun
- Hekang Li
- Junxiang Zhang
- Chao Song
- Zhen Wang
- Qiujiang Guo
- Francisco Machado
- Jack Kemp
- Thomas Iadecola
- Norman Y. Yao
- H. Wang
- Dong-Ling Deng
2025-08-27
Symmetry-protected topological phases 1–4 cannot be described by any local order parameter and are beyond the conventional symmetry-breaking model 5 . They are characterized by topological boundary modes that remain stable under symmetry respecting perturbations 1–4,6–8 . In clean, gapped systems without disorder, the stability of these edge modes is restricted to the zero-temperature manifold; at finite temperatures, interactions with mobile thermal excitations lead to their decay 9–11 . Here we report the observation of a distinct type of topological edge mode 12–14 , which is protected by emergent symmetries and persists across the entire spectrum, in an array of 100 programmable superconducting qubits. Through digital quantum simulation of a one-dimensional disorder-free stabilizer Hamiltonian, we observe robust long-lived topological edge modes over up to 30 cycles for a wide range of initial states. We show that the interaction between these edge modes and bulk excitations can be suppressed by dimerizing the stabilizer strength, leading to an emergent U(1) × U(1) symmetry in the prethermal regime of the system. Furthermore, we exploit these topological edge modes as logical qubits and prepare a logical Bell state, which exhibits persistent coherence, despite the system being disorder-free and at finite temperature. Our results establish a viable digital simulation approach 15–18 to experimentally study topological matter at finite temperature and demonstrate a potential route to construct long-lived, robust boundary qubits in disorder-free systems.