Abstract: Recent advances in experiments allowed us to simulate a variety of interesting quantum many-body phenomena from thermalization and localization to universal scaling across phase transitions. Despite the rapid progress, however, one of the most basic tasks to characterize such analog quantum simulators remains challenging: how can we estimate the many-body fidelity between an ideal target state and the actual state obtained from experiments? In this talk, I will present a simple and efficient benchmarking method that requires minimal experimental controllability. It only requires time-evolving a quantum system under its natural ergodic dynamics, followed by projective measurements in a fixed local basis. At its core, our method is made possible by using a newly-discovered phenomenon that occurs in strongly interacting quantum systems, namely the emergence of universal random statistics. I claim the phenomenon occurs universally in a wide class of ergodic quantum systems at infinite temperature by presenting a number of evidence based on solvable models and numerical simulations. I will discuss how we devised our benchmarking protocol based on the emergent randomness and demonstrate it both numerically for a number of model systems and experimentally using a Rydberg quantum simulator.

Lunch in Brush Gallery at noon.