Nonequilibrium steady states induced by stochastic mid-circuit measurements and resets on a quantum computer

Stochastic resetting has emerged as a versatile protocol to drive quantum many-body systems to non-equilibrium steady states by interspersing unitary dynamics with measurements and resets at random times. In spite of this, a quantum hardware validation of such non-equilibrium steady states is still missing. Here, we achieve this goal by first formulating a noisy discrete-time theory where unitary gates alternate with noisy mid-circuit projective measurements and conditional resets. This noisy conditional resetting theory is then demonstrated on a superconducting quantum processor for up to N=7 qubits. We consider, as a paradigmatic case, the unitary dynamics of the interacting Floquet transverse-field Ising model. The stationary state of the noisy conditional resetting agrees quantitatively with the experiments, and it shows crossover behavior related to the equilibrium quantum phase transition of the model. Our results might thus pave the way for the preparation of collective stationary states on noisy quantum devices and for further developments of quantum algorithms involving mid-circuit measurements.