Chiral and bond-ordered phases in a triangular-ladder superconducting-qubit quantum simulator

Quantum Physics [Submitted on 17 Mar 2026] Chiral and bond-ordered phases in a triangular-ladder superconducting-qubit quantum simulator Matthew Molinelli, Joshua C. Wang, Jeronimo G. C. Martinez, Sonny Lowe, Andrew Osborne, Rhine Samajdar, Andrew A. Houck Many-body systems with strong interactions often exhibit macroscopic behavior markedly absent in single-particle or noninteracting limits. Such emergent phenomena are well exemplified in lattice Hubbard models, where the interplay between interactions, geometric frustration, and magnetic flux gives rise to rich physics. Superconducting qubits naturally enable analog quantum simulation of Bose-Hubbard models, while offering tunable parameters, site-resolved control, and rapid experimental repetition rates. Here, we study a superconducting-qubit device that realizes the Bose-Hubbard model on a triangular-ladder lattice. By tuning the magnitude and sign of couplings, we engineer a synthetic magnetic flux to characterize the resulting half-filling ground state for various parameter regimes. We measure observables analogous to current-current correlators and bond kinetic energies, finding signatures consistent with chiral superfluids, Meissner superfluids, and bond-ordered insulators. Our results establish superconducting circuits as a platform for robustly probing quantum phases of matter in frustrated Bose-Hubbard systems, even in strongly correlated and gapless regimes. Comments: 11+10 pages, 4+10 figures Subjects: Quantum Physics (quant-ph); Mesoscale and Nanoscale Physics (cond-mat.mes-hall); Strongly Correlated Electrons (cond-mat.str-el); Superconductivity (cond-mat.supr-con) Cite as: arXiv:2603.16993 [quant-ph]   (or arXiv:2603.16993v1 [quant-ph] for this version)   https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2603.16993 Focus to learn more Submission history From: Rhine Samajdar [view email] [v1] Tue, 17 Mar 2026 18:00:00 UTC (13,004 KB) Access Paper: HTML (experimental) view license Current browse context: quant-ph < prev   |   next > new | recent | 2026-03 Change to browse by: cond-mat cond-mat.mes-hall cond-mat.str-el cond-mat.supr-con References & Citations INSPIRE HEP NASA ADS Google Scholar Semantic Scholar Export BibTeX Citation Bookmark Bibliographic Tools Bibliographic and Citation Tools Bibliographic Explorer Toggle Bibliographic Explorer (What is the Explorer?) Connected Papers Toggle Connected Papers (What is Connected Papers?) Litmaps Toggle Litmaps (What is Litmaps?) scite.ai Toggle scite Smart Citations (What are Smart Citations?) Code, Data, Media Demos Related Papers About arXivLabs Which authors of this paper are endorsers? | Disable MathJax (What is MathJax?)