Real time evolution and a traveling excitation in SU(2) pure gauge theory on a quantum computer

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates real-time evolution of SU(2) pure gauge theory on IBM quantum hardware, utilizing error mitigation techniques to observe a traveling excitation, advancing quantum simulation of non-Abelian gauge theories.

Contribution

It introduces a self-mitigation error correction method and successfully simulates long real-time evolution of a non-Abelian gauge theory on noisy quantum computers.

Findings

Successful simulation of dozens of Trotter steps with hundreds of CNOT gates

Observation of a traveling excitation in SU(2) gauge theory

Development of a self-mitigation error correction technique

Abstract

The Hamiltonian approach can be used successfully to study the real-time evolution of a non-Abelian lattice gauge theory on the available noisy quantum computers. In this work, results from the real-time evolution of SU(2) pure gauge theory on IBM hardware are presented. The long real-time evolution spanning dozens of Trotter steps with hundreds of CNOT gates and the observation of a traveling excitation on the lattice were made possible by using a collection of error mitigation techniques. Self-mitigation is our novel tool, which consists of using the same physics circuit as a noise-mitigation circuit.