III Colloquium IUFFyM 2024/2025
Taming gauge symmetry with quantum computers
Alejandro Bermúdez Carballo Instituto de Física Teórica, CSIC-UAM
Date: December 12th, 2024
Time: 13:00 h
Place: Aula I Trilingüe, Facultad de Ciencias, Universidad de Salamanca
The notion of gauge symmetry underlies our most accurate descriptions of the fundamental laws of Nature. In contrast to global symmetries, which transform quantum states in a prescribed manner and can be spontaneously broken leading to the variety of states of matter that surround us, gauge symmetry is often referred to as a ‘do-noting transformation’. Indeed, it acts trivially on physical quantum states, and is thus understood as some sort of redundancy as only gauge-invariant observable es can display a non-vanishing expectation value. In this talk, I will discuss recent progress in the field of quantum computation and quantum simulation that is progressively allowing to synthesize lattice field theories (sLFTs) in several laboratories worldwide. In this experiments, gauge symmetry is not a redundancy but rather an emergent approximate symmetry acting non-trivially on the whole Hilbert space of the system. I will show how one can use these quantum devices to explore problems such as confinement by designing the effective dimensionality and the gauge group of these sLFTs, and point to future exciting directions in which open problems in the field, revolving around the finite-density phases of quark matter or real-time non-equilibrium phenomena, could be addressed with these quantum devices.
