Nonequilibrium dynamics of quantum many-body systems is one of the main targets of quantum simulations. This focus - together with rapid advances in quantum-computing hardware - has driven increasing applications in high-energy physics, particularly in lattice gauge theories. However, most existing experimental demonstrations remain restricted to (1+1)-dimensional and/or abelian gauge theories, such as the Schwinger model and the toric code. It is essential to develop quantum simulations of nonabelian gauge theories in higher dimensions, addressing realistic problems in high-energy physics. To fill the gap, we demonstrate a quantum simulation of thermalization dynamics in a (2+1)-dimensional
q-deformed
SU(2)3 Yang-Mills theory using a trapped-ion quantum computer. By restricting the irreducible representations of the gauge fields to the integer-spin sector of
SU(2)3, we obtain a simplified yet nontrivial model described by Fibonacci anyons, which preserves the essential nonabelian fusion structure of the gauge fields. We successfully simulate the real-time dynamics of this model using quantum circuits that explicitly implement
F-moves. In our demonstrations, the quantum circuits execute up to 47 sequential
F-moves. We identify idling errors as the dominant error source, which can be effectively mitigated using dynamical decoupling combined with a parallelized implementation of
F-moves.
Abstract Nonequilibrium dynamics of quantum many-body systems is one of the main targets of quantum simulations. This focus – together with rapid advances in quantum-computing hardware – has driven increasing applications in high-energy physics, particularly in lattice gauge theories. However, most existing experimental demonstrations remain restricted to (1+1)-dimensional and/or abelian gauge theories, such as the Schwinger model and the toric code. It is essential to develop quantum simulations of nonabelian gauge theories in higher dimensions, addressing realistic problems in high-energy physics. To fill the gap, we demonstrate a quantum simulation of thermalization dynamics in a (2+1)-dimensional q-deformed SU(2)3 Yang–Mills theory using a trapped-ion quantum computer. By restricting the irreducible representations of the gauge fields to the integer-spin sector of SU(2)3, we obtain a simplified yet nontrivial model described by Fibonacci anyons, which preserves the essential nonabelian fusion structure of the gauge fields. We successfully simulate the real-time dynamics of this model using quantum circuits that explicitly implement F-moves. In our demonstrations, the quantum circuits execute up to 47 sequential F-moves. We identify idling errors as the dominant error source, which can be effectively mitigated using dynamical decoupling combined with a parallelized implementation of F-moves.
Simulating nonequilibirum dynamics of a quantum many-body system is one of the promising applications of quantum computing. We simulate the time evolution of one-dimensional Z 2 lattice gauge theory on IBM’s superconducting 156-qubit device, ibm_fez. We consider the Floquet circuit made of the Trotter decomposition of Hamiltonian evolution and focus on its dynamics toward thermalization. Quantum simulation with the help of error mitigation is successful in running the Floquet circuit made of 38 and 116 qubits up to 10 Trotter steps in the best case. This is enough to reach the early stage of prethermalization. Our work would be a benchmark for the potential power of quantum computing for high-energy physics problems. Published by the American Physical Society 2024