PIRSA:19040080 Scientific Series Other

DOI10.48660/19040080

Series: Colloquium

Muschik, C. (2019). How to simulate problems from high energy physics on quantum computers. Perimeter Institute. https://pirsa.org/19040080

Muschik, Christine. How to simulate problems from high energy physics on quantum computers. Perimeter Institute, Apr. 26, 2019, https://pirsa.org/19040080 

@misc{ pirsa_PIRSA:19040080,
  doi = {10.48660/19040080},
  url = {https://pirsa.org/19040080},
  author = {Muschik, Christine},
  keywords = {Other},
  language = {en},
  title = {How to simulate problems from high energy physics on quantum computers},
  publisher = {Perimeter Institute},
  year = {2019},
  month = {apr},
  note = {PIRSA:19040080 see, \url{https://pirsa.org}}
}

Abstract

Gauge theories are fundamental to our understanding of interactions between the elementary constituents of matter as mediated by gauge bosons. However, computing the real-time dynamics in gauge theories is a notorious challenge for classical computational methods. In the spirit of Feynman's vision of a quantum simulator, this has recently stimulated theoretical effort to devise schemes for simulating such theories on engineered quantum-mechanical devices, with the difficulty that gauge invariance and the associated local conservation laws (Gauss laws) need to be implemented. Here we report the first digital quantum simulation of a lattice gauge theory, by realising 1+1-dimensional quantum electrodynamics (Schwinger model) on a few-qubit trapped-ion quantum computer. We are interested in the real-time evolution of the Schwinger mechanism, describing the instability of the bare vacuum due to quantum fluctuations, which manifests itself in the spontaneous creation of electron-positron pairs. Our work represents a first step towards quantum simulating high-energy theories with atomic physics experiments, the long-term vision being the extension to real-time quantum simulations of non-Abelian lattice gauge theories. 

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