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arXiv:2405.18504

Symmetry-protection Zeno phase transition in monitored lattice gauge theories

Matteo M. Wauters, Edoardo Ballini, Alberto Biella, Philipp Hauke

Published May 28, 2024• 1 citation
arXivHTMLPDF

Abstract

Quantum measurements profoundly influence system dynamics. They lead to complex nonequilibrium phenomena like the quantum Zeno effect, and they can be used for mitigating errors in quantum simulations. Such an ability is particularly valuable for lattice gauge theories (LGTs), which require the challenging preservation of an extensive number of local conservation laws. While it is known that tailored quantum measurements can soften violations of gauge symmetry, the nature of this protection, and in particular the possibility of a threshold behavior, is still unexplored. Here, we demonstrate the existence of a sharp transition, triggered by the measurement rate, between a protected gauge-theory regime resistant to simulation errors and an irregular regime. Our results are based on the paradigmatic example of a 1+1d $\mathbb{Z}_2$ LGT. We study in detail the protection through projective measurements of ancillary qubits coupled to the local symmetry generators, and compare this approach with analog (weak) measurement protocols. We show that, while the resulting ensemble averages in the continuous-time limit share the same Liouvillian dynamics, different physical implementations of the stochastic gauge protection protocol yield trajectory unravelings with vastly different statistics. Additionally, we design an on-chip feedback mechanism that corrects bit-flip errors and significantly enhances the discrete-time scheme. Our results shed light on the dissipative criticality of strongly-interacting, highly-constrained quantum systems, and they offer valuable insights into error mitigation and correction of gauge-theory quantum simulations.

DOI
10.48550/arxiv.2405.18504

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Quantum measurements profoundly influence system dynamics. They lead to complex nonequilibrium phenomena like the quantum Zeno effect, and they can be used for mitigating errors in quantum simulations. Such an ability is particularly valuable for lattice gauge theories (LGTs), which require the challenging preservation of an extensive number of local conservation laws. While it is known that tailored quantum measurements can soften violations of gauge symmetry, the nature of this protection, and in particular the possibility of a threshold behavior, is still unexplored. Here, we demonstrate the existence of a sharp transition, triggered by the measurement rate, between a protected gauge-theory regime resistant to simulation errors and an irregular regime. Our results are based on the paradigmatic example of a 1+1d Z2\mathbb{Z}_2Z2​ LGT. We study in detail the protection through projective measurements of ancillary qubits coupled to the local symmetry generators, and compare this approach with analog (weak) measurement protocols. We show that, while the resulting ensemble averages in the continuous-time limit share the same Liouvillian dynamics, different physical implementations of the stochastic gauge protection protocol yield trajectory unravelings with vastly different statistics. Additionally, we design an on-chip feedback mechanism that corrects bit-flip errors and significantly enhances the discrete-time scheme. Our results shed light on the dissipative criticality of strongly-interacting, highly-constrained quantum systems, and they offer valuable insights into error mitigation and correction of gauge-theory quantum simulations.
Quantum measurements profoundly influence system dynamics. They lead to complex nonequilibrium phenomena like the quantum Zeno effect, and they can be used for mitigating errors in quantum simulations. Such an ability is particularly valuable for lattice gauge theories (LGTs), which require the challenging preservation of an extensive number of local conservation laws. While it is known that tailored quantum measurements can soften violations of gauge symmetry, the nature of this protection, and in particular the possibility of a threshold behavior, is still unexplored. Here, we demonstrate the existence of a sharp transition, triggered by the measurement rate, between a protected gauge-theory regime resistant to simulation errors and an irregular regime. Our results are based on the paradigmatic example of a (1+11+11+1)-dimensional Z2{\mathbb{Z}}_{2}Z2​ LGT. We study in detail the protection through projective measurements of ancillary qubits coupled to the local symmetry generators, and compare this approach with analog (weak) measurement protocols. We show that, while the resulting ensemble averages in the continuous-time limit share the same Liouvillian dynamics, different physical implementations of the stochastic gauge protection protocol yield trajectory unravelings with vastly different statistics. Additionally, we design an on-chip feedback mechanism that corrects bit-flip errors and significantly enhances the discrete-time scheme. Our results shed light on the dissipative criticality of strongly interacting, highly constrained quantum systems, and they offer valuable insights into error mitigation and correction of gauge-theory quantum simulations.
Abstract Quantum simulations of lattice gauge theories (LGTs) are often formulated on an enlarged Hilbert space containing both physical and unphysical sectors in order to retain a local Hamiltonian. We provide simple fault-tolerant procedures that exploit such redundancy by combining a phase flip error correction code with the Gauss’ law constraint to correct one-qubit errors for a Z2{{\mathbb{Z}}}_{2}Z2​ Z 2 or truncated U(1) LGT in 1+1 and 2+1 dimensions with a link flux cutoff of 1. Unlike existing work on detecting violations of Gauss’ law, our circuits are fault tolerant and the overall error correction scheme outperforms a naïve application of the [5, 1, 3] code. The constructions outlined can be extended to LGT systems with larger cutoffs and may be of use in understanding how to hybridize error correction and quantum simulation for LGTs in higher space-time dimensions and with different symmetry groups.
Simulations of lattice gauge theories on noisy quantum hardware inherently suffer from violations of the gauge symmetry due to coherent and incoherent errors of the underlying physical system that implements the simulation. These gauge violations cause the simulations to become unphysical requiring the result of the simulation to be discarded. We investigate an active correction scheme that relies on detecting gauge violations locally and subsequently correcting them by dissipatively driving the system back into the physical gauge sector. We show that the correction scheme not only ensures the protection of the gauge symmetry, but it also leads to a longer validity of the simulation results even within the gauge-invariant sector. Finally, we discuss further applications of the scheme such as preparation of the many-body ground state of the simulated system. Published by the American Physical Society 2024
Simulations of lattice gauge theories on noisy quantum hardware inherently suffer from violations of the gauge symmetry due to coherent and incoherent errors of the underlying physical system that implements the simulation. These gauge violations cause the simulations to become unphysical requiring the result of the simulation to be discarded. We investigate an active correction scheme that relies on detecting gauge violations locally and subsequently correcting them by dissipatively driving the system back into the physical gauge sector. We show that the correction scheme not only ensures the protection of the gauge symmetry, but it also leads to a longer validity of the simulation results even within the gauge-invariant sector. Finally, we discuss further applications of the scheme such as preparation of the many-body ground state of the simulated system.
Gauge invariance is central to modern physics and underpins quantum simulations of lattice gauge theories (LGTs). Existing quantum simulation approaches employ Gauss's law either to energetically suppress gauge-violating processes in analog platforms or to detect and discard gauge-violating outcomes in digital devices. Here we introduce a third paradigm, in which Gauss's law is used to dynamically generate the gauge theory itself from a substantially simpler Hamiltonian. Starting from a readily programmable three-body XXX model, we employ experimentally efficient single-qubit U(1) gauge symmetry-generator terms that induce the dynamics of a U(1) LGT. We implement this approach using 101 qubits on a 156-qubit IBM quantum processor and observe real-time dynamics in quantitative agreement with the target LGT while reducing the entangling-gate depth per Trotter step by a factor of five compared with a direct implementation. Our results establish gauge protection as a resource for Hamiltonian engineering rather than merely symmetry preservation, opening a scalable resource-efficient route towards digital quantum simulations of increasingly complex gauge theories in higher spatial dimensions.
Quantum simulation of the dynamics of a lattice gauge theory demands imposing on-site constraints. Ideally, the dynamics remain confined within the physical Hilbert space, where all the states satisfy those constraints. For non-Abelian gauge theories, implementing local constraints is non-trivial, as is keeping the dynamics confined in the physical Hilbert space, considering the erroneous quantum devices. SU(3) gauge group, albeit crucial for describing the strong interaction of nature, is notorious for studying via Hamiltonian simulation. This work presents a couple of symmetry protection protocols for simulating the exact dynamics of SU(3) gauge theory in 1+11+11+1 dimension. The first protocol doesn't require imposing any local symmetry but relies on protecting global symmetries, which are Abelian with a preferred choice of framework, namely the loop-string-hadron framework. Generalization to a higher dimension is possible, however, the protection scheme needs to be local for that case but is still Abelian and thus advantageous. The symmetry protection schemes presented here are important steps towards quantum simulating the full theory of quantum chromodynamics.