Investigating how to simulate lattice gauge theories on a quantum computer

TL;DR

This paper explores the feasibility of simulating lattice gauge theories on quantum computers, focusing on energy spectra and time evolution of an SU(2) theory using D-Wave and IBM hardware.

Contribution

It demonstrates the application of different quantum hardware to simulate non-Abelian gauge theories, highlighting current capabilities and limitations.

Findings

Successful simulation of SU(2) energy spectrum

Observation of time evolution dynamics

Assessment of hardware performance and noise effects

Abstract

Quantum computers have the potential to expand the utility of lattice gauge theory to investigate non-perturbative particle physics phenomena that cannot be accessed using a standard Monte Carlo method due to the sign problem. Thanks to the qubit, quantum computers can store Hilbert space in a more efficient way compared to classical computers. This allows the Hamiltonian approach to be computationally feasible, leading to absolute freedom from the sign-problem. But what the current noisy intermediate scale quantum hardware can achieve is under investigation, and therefore we chose to study the energy spectrum and the time evolution of an SU(2) theory using two kinds of quantum hardware: the D-Wave quantum annealer and the IBM gate-based quantum hardware.