TY - JOUR T1 - Quantum Catalysis of Magnetic Phase Transitions in a Quantum Simulator JF - Physical Review Letters Y1 - 2013 A1 - Philip Richerme A1 - Crystal Senko A1 - Simcha Korenblit A1 - Jacob Smith A1 - Aaron Lee A1 - Rajibul Islam A1 - Wesley C. Campbell A1 - Christopher Monroe AB - We control quantum fluctuations to create the ground state magnetic phases of a classical Ising model with a tunable longitudinal magnetic field using a system of 6 to 10 atomic ion spins. Due to the long-range Ising interactions, the various ground state spin configurations are separated by multiple first-order phase transitions, which in our zero temperature system cannot be driven by thermal fluctuations. We instead use a transverse magnetic field as a quantum catalyst to observe the first steps of the complete fractal devil's staircase, which emerges in the thermodynamic limit and can be mapped to a large number of many-body and energy-optimization problems. VL - 111 UR - http://arxiv.org/abs/1303.6983v2 CP - 10 J1 - Phys. Rev. Lett. U5 - 10.1103/PhysRevLett.111.100506 ER -