Suppressing Coherent Gauge Drift in Quantum Simulations

Abstract

Simulations of field theories on noisy quantum computers must contend with errors introduced by that noise. For gauge theories, a large class of errors violate gauge symmetry, and thus may result in unphysical processes occurring in the simulation. We present a method, applicable to non-Abelian gauge theories, for suppressing coherent gauge drift errors through the repeated application of pseudorandom gauge transformation. In cases where the dominant errors are gauge-violating, we expect this method to be a practical way to improve the accuracy of NISQ-era simulations.