How many quantum gates do gauge theories require?

Abstract

We discuss the implementation of lattice gauge theories on digital quantum computers, focusing primarily on the number of quantum gates required to simulate their time evolution. We find that to compile quantum circuits, using available state-of-the-art methods with our own augmentations, the cost of a single time step of an elementary plaquette is beyond what is reasonably practical in the current era of quantum hardware. However, we observe that such costs are highly sensitive to the truncation scheme used to derive different Hamiltonian formulations of non-Abelian gauge theories, emphasizing the need for low-dimensional truncations of such models in the same universality class as the desired theories.