Digital Quantum Simulation of the Kitaev Quantum Spin Liquid

The ground state of the Kitaev quantum spin liquid on a honeycomb lattice is an intriguing many-body state characterized by its topological order and massive entanglement. One of the significant issues is to prepare and manipulate the ground state as well as excited states in a quantum simulator. Here, we provide a protocol to manipulate the Kitaev quantum spin liquid via digital quantum simulation. A series of unitary gates for the protocol is explicitly constructed, showing its circuit depth is an order of O(N) with the number of qubits, N. We demonstrate the efficiency of our protocol on the IBM Heron r2 processor for N = 8 and 12. We further validate our theoretical framework through numerical simulations, confirming high-fidelity quantum state control for system sizes up to N = 450, and discuss the possible implications of these results.