Published March 31, 2025 | Published
Journal Article Open

Playing Nonlocal Games across a Topological Phase Transition on a Quantum Computer

  • 1. ROR icon University of Colorado Boulder
  • 2. ROR icon California Institute of Technology
  • 3. ROR icon University of Sydney

Abstract

Many-body quantum games provide a natural perspective on phases of matter in quantum hardware, crisply relating the quantum correlations inherent in phases of matter to the securing of quantum advantage at a device-oriented task. In this Letter, we introduce a family of multiplayer quantum games for which topologically ordered phases of matter are a resource yielding quantum advantage. Unlike previous examples, quantum advantage persists away from the exactly solvable point and is robust to arbitrary local perturbations, irrespective of system size. We demonstrate this robustness experimentally on Quantinuum’s H1-1 quantum computer by playing the game with a continuous family of randomly deformed toric code states that can be created with constant-depth circuits leveraging midcircuit measurements and unitary feedback. We are thus able to tune through a topological phase transition—witnessed by the loss of robust quantum advantage—on currently available quantum hardware. This behavior is contrasted with an analogous family of deformed Greenberger-Horne-Zeilinger states, for which arbitrarily weak local perturbations destroy quantum advantage in the thermodynamic limit. Finally, we discuss a topological interpretation of the game, which leads to a natural generalization involving an arbitrary number of players.

Copyright and License

© 2025 American Physical Society.

Acknowledgement

We thank Karl Mayer for helpful discussions during the early stages of this project. R. N. and O. H. are supported by the U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Science, Basic Energy Sciences, under Award No. DE-SC0021346. This research used resources of the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility, which is a DOE Office of Science User Facility supported under Contract No. DE-AC05-00OR22725. D. T. S. is supported by the Simons Collaboration on Ultra-Quantum Matter, which is a grant from the Simons Foundation (651440). D. J. W. was supported in part by the Australian Research Council Discovery Early Career Research Award (DE220100625).

Data Availability

The dataset used to make Fig. 2 will be uploaded to Zenodo at Ref. [49].

Supplemental Material

The supplemental material contains a more explicit definition of the stringlike operators used in the trapped-ion implementation, details of the mapping to a classical random-bond Ising model for the unitary deformation protocol, and an analysis of the performance of the game when it is extended to a generic number of players.

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Additional details

Created:
April 4, 2025
Modified:
April 4, 2025