Simulating QCD on a Quantum Computer
Dorota Grabowska (University of Washington, Seattle)
Tuesday, 25 November 2025 at 10:45
Abstract
The phase diagram of Quantum Chromodynamics has a complex array of emergent phenomena. This necessitates developing a wide range of computational tools to probe its varied properties. One such tool, which has seen rapid development in recent years, is quantum computation. In contrast to simulations on classical computers, which use the Lagrangian formulation and have been ongoing for several decades, simulating physical theories on quantum devices necessitates utilizing the Hamiltonian formulation. For gauge theories, much effort has focused on constructing various approaches, using myriad bases, truncation schemes and degrees of gauge fixing. Ideally, a formulation would be systematically improvable, efficient for fine lattices, and gauge invariant. No such formulation has yet been developed and so at least one of these desired properties must be sacrificed. In this talk, I focus on a formulation, developed in the last several years, that utilizes the axis-angle representation of SU(2) and is gauge-fixed using a max-tree gauge fixing procedure. Due to gauge fixing, not only can this formulation be simulated close to the continuum limit more efficiently than many non-gauge fixed formations, but there is a plethora of analytic results that can help bound simulation results. I will present several of these analytic results and discuss their implications for numerical simulations of dynamics of an SU(2) gauge theory. I will also touch briefly on results from simulations of this system on small lattice volumes.