Emergent Hydrodynamic Mode on SU(2) Plaquette Chains and Quantum Simulation

We search for emergent hydrodynamic modes in real-time Hamiltonian dynamics of 2+1-dimensional SU(2) lattice gauge theory on a quasi one dimensional plaquette chain, by numerically computing symmetric correlation functions of energy densities on lattice sizes of about 20 with the local Hilbert space truncated at j_max=1/2 Due to the Umklapp processes, we only find a mode for energy diffusion. The symmetric correlator exhibits transport peak near zero frequency with a width proportional to momentum squared at small momentum, when the system is fully quantum ergodic, as indicated by the eigenenergy level statistics. This transport peak leads to a power-law t^(-1/2) decay of the symmetric correlator at late time, also known as the long-time tail, as well as diffusion-like spreading in position space. We also introduce a quantum algorithm for computing the symmetric correlator on a quantum computer and find it gives results consistent with exact diagonalization when tested on the IBM emulator. Finally we discuss the future prospect of searching for the sound modes.

We thank Anton Andreev, Paul Romatschke and Larry Yaffe for discussions that inspired this study. This work is supported by the U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Science, Office of Nuclear Physics, InQubator for Quantum Simulation (IQuS) (https://iqus.uw.edu) under Award Number DOE (NP) Award DE-SC0020970 via the program on Quantum Horizons: QIS Research and Innovation for Nuclear Science. This research used resources of the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC), a Department of Energy Office of Science User Facility using NERSC award NP- ERCAP0032083. This work was enabled, in part, by the use of advanced computational, storage and networking infrastructure provided by the Hyak supercomputer system at the University of Washington.