Engineered, highly controllable quantum systems are promising simulators of emergent physics beyond the simulation capabilities of classical computers¹. An important problem in many-body physics is itinerant magnetism, which originates purely from long-range interactions of free electrons and whose existence in real systems has been debated for decades^2,3. Here we use a quantum simulator consisting of a four-electron-site square plaquette of quantum dots⁴ to demonstrate Nagaoka ferromagnetism⁵. This form of itinerant magnetism has been rigorously studied theoretically^6–9 but has remained unattainable in experiments. We load the plaquette with three electrons and demonstrate the predicted emergence of spontaneous ferromagnetic correlations through pairwise measurements of spin. We find that the ferromagnetic ground state is remarkably robust to engineered disorder in the on-site potentials and we can induce a transition to the low-spin state by changing the plaquette topology to an open chain. This demonstration of Nagaoka ferromagnetism highlights that quantum simulators can be used to study physical phenomena that have not yet been observed in any experimental system. The work also constitutes an important step towards large-scale quantum dot simulators of correlated electron systems.

We address the interaction between two quantum systems (A and B) that is mediated by their common linear environment. If the environment is out of equilibrium, the resulting interaction violates Onsager relations and cannot be described by a Hamiltonian. In simple terms, the action of system A on system B does not necessarily produce a back action. We derive general quantum equations describing the situation, and we analyze in detail their classical correspondence. Changing the properties of the environment, one can easily change and engineer the resulting interaction. It is tempting to use this for quantum manipulation of the systems. However, the resulting quantum gate is not always unitary and may induce a loss of quantum coherence. For a relevant example, we consider systems A and B to be spins of arbitrary values and arrange the interaction to realize an analog of the two-qubit cnot gate. The direction of spin A controls the rotation of spin B while spin A is not rotated experiencing no back action from spin B. We solve the quantum dynamics equations and analyze the purity of the resulting density matrix. The resulting purity essentially depends on the initial states of the systems. We attempt to find a universal characteristic of the purity, optimizing it for the worst choice of initial states. For both spins sA=sB=1/2, the optimized purity is bounded by 1/2 irrespective of the details of the gate. We also study in detail the semiclassical limit of large spins. In this case, the optimized purity is bounded by (1+π/2)-1≈0.39. This is much better than the typical purity of a large spin state ∼s-1. We conclude that although the quantum manipulation without back action inevitably causes decoherence of the quantum states, the actual purity of the resulting state can be optimized and made relatively high.

We study the Zeeman splitting in lateral quantum dots that are defined in GaAs-AlGaAs heterostructures by means of split gates. We demonstrate a nonlinear dependence of the splitting on magnetic field and its substantial variations from dot to dot and from heterostructure to heterostructure. These phenomena are important in the context of information processing since the tunability and dot-dependence of the Zeeman splitting allow for a selective manipulation of spins. We show that spin-orbit effects related to the GaAs band structure quantitatively explain the observed magnitude of the nonlinear dependence of the Zeeman splitting. Furthermore, spin-orbit effects result in a dependence of the Zeeman splitting on predominantly the out-of-plane quantum dot confinement energy. We also show that the variations of the confinement energy due to charge disorder in the heterostructure may explain the dependence of Zeeman splitting on the dot position. This position may be varied by changing the gate voltages, which leads to an electrically tunable Zeeman splitting.

We study phase transitions in a two dimensional weakly interacting Bose gas in a random potential at finite temperatures. We identify superfluid, normal fluid, and insulator phases and construct the phase diagram. At T=0 one has a tricritical point where the three phases coexist. The truncation of the energy distribution at the trap barrier, which is a generic phenomenon in cold atom systems, limits the growth of the localization length and in contrast to the thermodynamic limit the insulator phase is present at any temperature.