The Sachdev-Ye-Kitaev (SYK) model incorporates rich physics, ranging from exotic non-Fermi liquid states without quasiparticle excitations, to holographic duality and quantum chaos. However, its experimental realization remains a daunting challenge due to various unnatural ingredients of the SYK Hamiltonian such as its strong randomness and fully nonlocal fermion interaction. At present, constructing such a nonlocal Hamiltonian and exploring its dynamics is best through digital quantum simulation, where state-of-the-art techniques can already handle a moderate number of qubits. Here, we demonstrate a first step towards simulation of the SYK model on a nuclear-spin-chain simulator. We observed the fermion paring instability of the non-Fermi liquid state and the chaotic-nonchaotic transition at simulated temperatures, as was predicted by previous theories. As the realization of the SYK model in practice, our experiment opens a new avenue towards investigating the key features of non-Fermi liquid states, as well as the quantum chaotic systems and the AdS/CFT duality.

Sachdev-Ye-Kitaev（SYK）模型融合了丰富的物理学，从没有准粒子激发的奇异非费米液态到全息对偶性和量子混沌。然而，由于SYK哈密顿量的各种非天然成分，如强随机性和完全非局部的费米子相互作用，其实验实现仍然是一项艰巨的挑战。目前，通过数字量子模拟来构建这样一个非局部哈密顿量并探索其动力学是最好的，其中最先进的技术已经可以处理中等数量的量子比特。在这里，我们展示了在核自旋链模拟器上模拟SYK模型的第一步。我们观察到在模拟温度下非费米液态的费米子成对不稳定性以及混沌-非混沌转变，正如以前的理论所预测的那样。随着实践中SYK模型的实现，我们的实验为研究非费米液态，量子混沌系统和AdS / CFT对偶性的关键特征开辟了一条新途径。