Quantum Simulation of Conformal Field Theory

Abstract

Conformal field theory, describing systems with scaling symmetry, plays a crucial role throughout physics. We describe a quantum algorithm to simulate the dynamics of conformal field theories, including the action of local conformal transformations. A full analysis of the approximation errors suggests near-term applicability of our algorithm: promising results for conformal field theories with central charge c=1/2 are obtained already with 128 logical qubits.