Probing Defects with Quantum Simulator Snapshots
Abhijat Sarma, Nayan E. Myerson-Jain, Yue Liu, Nandagopal Manoj, Jason Alicea, Roger G. Melko, Cenke Xu · Physical Review Letters · 2026
Snapshots-i.e., projective measurements of local degrees of freedom-are the most standard data taken in experiments on quantum simulators, usually to probe local physics. In this Letter we propose a simple protocol to experimentally probe physics of defects with these snapshots. Our protocol relies only on snapshots from the bulk system, without introducing the defect explicitly; as such, the physics of different kinds of defects can be probed using the same dataset. In particular, we demonstrate that, with snapshots of local spin configurations of, for example, the 1d Rydberg atom realization of the quantum Ising criticality, we can (1) extract the "defect entropy" and (2) access the continuous line of fixed points of effective defect conformal field theory.