Many-body Quantum Score: a scalable benchmark for digital and analog quantum processors and first test on a commercial neutral atom device
We propose the Many-Body Quantum Score (MBQS), a practical and scalable application-level benchmark protocol designed to evaluate how accurately quantum processing units (QPUs)---both gate-based and analog---can simulate many-body quantum dynamics. MBQS quantifies performance by identifying the maximum number of qubits with which a QPU can reliably reproduce correlation functions of the transverse-field Ising model following a specific quantum quench. This quench reveals a global correlation surge, a collective peak of connected correlations at all distances, which to our knowledge had not been noticed so far in this context. This paper presents the MBQS protocol and highlights its design principles, supported by analytical insights, classical simulations, and experimental data. It also reports an implementation on Ruby, an analog QPU based on Rydberg atoms developed by the Pasqal company. These findings demonstrate MBQS's potential as a robust and informative tool for benchmarking near-term quantum devices for many-body physics. While the present experimental validation has been performed on an analog device, the protocol has the potential to be implemented on digital platforms as well.