The key issue for the implementation of a metamaterial is to demonstrate the existence of collective modes corresponding to coherent oscillations of the meta-atoms. Atoms of natural materials interact with electromagnetic fields as quantum two-level systems. Artificial quantum two-level systems can be made, for example, using superconducting nonlinear resonators cooled down to their ground state. Here we perform an experiment in which 20 of these quantum meta-atoms, so-called flux qubits, are embedded into a microwave resonator. We observe the dispersive shift of the resonator frequency imposed by the qubit metamaterial and the collective resonant coupling of eight qubits. The realized prototype represents a mesoscopic limit of naturally occurring spin ensembles and as such we demonstrate the AC-Zeeman shift of a resonant qubit ensemble. The studied system constitutes the implementation of a basic quantum metamaterial in the sense that many artificial atoms are coupled collectively to the quantized mode of a photon field.

We consider superconducting circuits for the purpose of simulating the spin-boson model. The spin-boson model consists of a single two-level system coupled to bosonic modes. In most cases, the model is considered in a limit where the bosonic modes are sufficiently dense to form a continuous spectral bath. A very well known case is the ohmic bath, where the density of states grows linearly with the frequency. In the limit of weak coupling or large temperature, this problem can be solved numerically. If the coupling is strong, the bosonic modes can become sufficiently excited to make a classical simulation impossible. Here, we discuss how a quantum simulation of this problem can be performed by coupling a superconducting qubit to a set of microwave resonators. We demonstrate a possible implementation of a continuous spectral bath with individual bath resonators coupling strongly to the qubit. Applying a microwave drive scheme potentially allows us to access the strongcoupling regime of the spin-boson model. We discuss how the resulting spin relaxation dynamics with different initialization conditions can be probed by standard qubit-readout techniques from circuit quantum electrodynamics.

A key goal of digital quantum computing is the simulation of fermionic systems such as molecules or the Hubbard model. Unfortunately, for present and near-future quantum computers the use of quantum error correction schemes is still out of reach. Hence, the finite error rate limits the use of quantum computers to algorithms with a low number of gates. The variational Hamiltonian ansatz (VHA) has been shown to produce the ground state in good approximation in a manageable number of steps. Here we study explicitly the effect of gate errors on its performance. The VHA is inspired by the adiabatic quantum evolution under the influence of a time-dependent Hamiltonian, where the -ideally short -fixed Trotter time steps are replaced by variational parameters. The method profits substantially from quantum variational error suppression, e.g., unitary quasi-static errors are mitigated within the algorithm. We test the performance of the VHA when applied to the Hubbard model in the presence of unitary control errors on quantum computers with realistic gate fidelities.

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