We construct two quantum error correction codes for pure SU(2) lattice gauge theory in the electric basis truncated at the electric flux $j_{\rm max}=1/2$, which are applicable on quasi-1D plaquette chains, 2D honeycomb and 3D triamond and hyperhoneycomb lattices. The first code converts Gauss’s law at each vertex into a stabilizer while the second only uses half vertices and is locally the carbon code. Both codes are able to correct single-qubit errors. The electric and magnetic terms in the SU(2) Hamiltonian are expressed in terms of logical gates in both codes. The logical-gate Hamiltonian in the first code exactly matches the spin Hamiltonian for gauge singlet states found in previous work.

Generalized Parton Distribution functions (GPDs) are light-cone matrix elements that encode the internal structure of hadrons in terms of quark and gluon degrees of freedom. In this work, we present the first nonperturbative study of quasi-GPDs in the massive Schwinger model, quantum electrodynamics in 1+1 dimensions (QED2), within the Hamiltonian formulation of lattice field theory. Quasi-distributions are spatial correlation functions of boosted states, which approach the relevant light-cone distributions in the luminal limit. Using tensor networks, we prepare the first excited state in the strongly coupled regime and boost it to finite momentum on lattices of up to 400 lattice sites.
We compute both quasiparton distribution functions and, for the first time, quasi-GPDs, and study how they converge with increasing boost and in the continuum limit. In addition, we perform analytic calculations of GPDs in the two-particle Fock-space approximation and in the Reggeized limit, providing qualitative benchmarks for the tensor network results. Our analysis establishes computational benchmarks for accessing partonic observables in low-dimensional gauge theories, offering a starting point for future extensions to higher dimensions, non-Abelian theories, and quantum simulations.

Classical shadows provide a versatile framework for estimating many properties of quantum states from repeated, randomly chosen measurements without requiring full quantum state tomography. When prior information is available—such as knowledge of symmetries of states and operators—this knowledge can be exploited to significantly improve sample efficiency. In this work, we develop three classical shadow protocols tailored to systems with local (or gauge) symmetries to enable efficient prediction of gauge-invariant observables in lattice gauge theory models which are currently at the forefront of quantum simulation efforts. For such models, our approaches can offer exponential improvements in sample complexity over symmetry-agnostic methods, albeit at the cost of increased circuit complexity. We demonstrate these trade-offs using a Z2 lattice gauge theory, where a dual formulation enables a rigorous analysis of resource requirements, including both circuit depth and sample complexity.

We investigate the quantum statistical properties of the confining string connecting a static fermion-antifermion pair in the massive Schwinger model. By analyzing the reduced density matrix of the subsystem located in between the fermion and antifermion, we demonstrate that as the interfermion separation approaches the string-breaking distance, the overlap between the microscopic density matrix and an effective thermal density matrix exhibits a pronounced, narrow peak, approaching unity at the onset of string breaking. This behavior reveals that the confining flux tube evolves toward a genuinely thermal state as the separation between the charges grows, even in the absence of an external heat bath.
In other words, one cannot tell whether a reduced state of the subsystem arises from a surrounding heat bath or from entanglement with the rest of the system. The entanglement spectrum near the critical string-breaking distance exhibits a rapid transition from the dominance of a single state describing the confining electric string towards a strongly entangled state containing virtual fermion-antifermion pairs.
Our findings establish a quantitative link between confinement, entanglement, and emergent thermality, and suggest that string breaking corresponds to a microscopic thermalization transition within the flux tube.

We investigate the time dependence of anti-flatness in the entanglement spectrum, a measure for non-stabilizerness and lower bound for non-local quantum magic, on a subsystem of a linear SU(2) plaquette chain during thermalization. Tracing the time evolution of a large number of initial states, we find that the anti-flatness exhibits a barrier-like maximum during the time period when the entanglement entropy of the subsystem grows rapidly from the initial value to the microcanonical entropy. The location of the peak is strongly correlated with the time when the entanglement exhibits the strongest growth. This behavior is found for generic highly excited initial computational basis states and persists for coupling constants across the ergodic regime, revealing a universal structure of the entanglement spectrum during thermalization. We conclude that quantitative simulations of thermalization for nonabelian gauge theories require quantum computing. We speculate that this property generalizes to other quantum chaotic systems.

Non-local magic and anti-flatness provide a measure of the quantum complexity in the wavefunction of a physical system. Supported by entanglement, they cannot be removed by local unitary operations, thus providing basis-independent measures, and sufficiently large values underpin the need for quantum computers in order to perform precise simulations of the system at scale. Towards a better understanding of the quantum-complexity generation by fundamental interactions, the building blocks of many-body systems, we consider non-local magic and anti-flatness in two-particle scattering processes, specifically focusing on low-energy nucleon-nucleon scattering and high-energy Moller scattering. We find that the non-local magic induced in both interactions is four times the anti-flatness (which is found to be true for any two-qubit wavefunction), and verify the relation between the Clifford-averaged anti-flatness and total magic. For these processes, the anti-flatness is a more experimentally accessible quantity as it can be determined from one of the final-state particles, and does not require spin correlations. While the MOLLER experiment at the Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility does not include final-state spin measurements, the results presented here may add motivation to consider their future inclusion.

We would like to thank Krishna Kumar for enlightening discussions about MOLLER and other electron scattering experiments. We are grateful to the organizers and participants of the First and Second International Workshops on Many-Body Quantum Magic. This work was supported, in part, by Universitat Bielefeld (Caroline), and by U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Science, Office of Nuclear Physics, InQubator for Quantum Simulation (IQuS) under Award Number DOE (NP) Award DE-SC0020970 via the program on Quantum Horizons: QIS Research and Innovation for Nuclear Science (Martin). This work was also supported, in part, through the Department of Physics and the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Washington. We have made extensive use of Wolfram Mathematica.

This is a plenary talk given at Quark Matter 2025, summarizing recent theoretical developments for the understanding of quarkonium production in relativistic heavy ion collisions and how quarkonium uniquely probes the deconfined phase of QCD matter.

We test the eigenstate thermalization hypothesis (ETH) in 1+1-dimensional SU(2) lattice gauge theory (LGT) with one flavor of dynamical fermions. Using the loop-string-hadron framework of the LGT with a bosonic cut-off, we exactly diagonalize the Hamiltonian for finite size systems and calculate matrix elements (MEs) in the eigenbasis for both local and non-local operators. We analyze different indicators to identify the parameter space for quantum chaos at finite lattice sizes and investigate how the ETH behavior emerges in both the diagonal and off-diagonal MEs. Our investigations allow us to study various time scales of thermalization and the emergence of random matrix behavior, and highlight the interplays of the several diagnostics with each other. Furthermore, from the off-diagonal MEs, we extract a smooth function that is closely related to the spectral function for both local and non-local operators. We find numerical evidence of the spectral gap and the memory peak in the non-local operator case. Finally, we investigate aspects of subsystem ETH in the lattice gauge theory and find some features in the subsystem reduced density matrix that are unique to gauge theories.

Simulating out-of-equilibrium dynamics of quantum field theories in nature is challenging with classical methods, but is a promising application for quantum computers. Unfortunately, simulating interacting bosonic fields involves a high boson-to-qubit encoding overhead. Furthermore, when mapping to qubits, the infinite-dimensional Hilbert space of bosons is necessarily truncated, with truncation errors that grow with energy and time. A qubit-based quantum computer, augmented with an active bosonic register, and with qubit, bosonic, and mixed qubit-boson quantum gates, offers a more powerful platform for simulating bosonic theories. We demonstrate this capability experimentally in a hybrid analog-digital trapped-ion quantum computer, where qubits are encoded in the internal states of the ions, and the bosons in the ions’ motional states. Specifically, we simulate nonequilibrium dynamics of a (1+1)-dimensional Yukawa model, a simplified model of interacting nucleons and pions, and measure fermion- and boson-occupation-state probabilities. These dynamics populate high bosonic-field excitations starting from an empty state, and the experimental results capture well such high-occupation states. This simulation approaches the regime where classical methods become challenging, bypasses the need for a large qubit overhead, and removes truncation errors. Our results, therefore, open the way to achieving demonstrable quantum advantage in qubit-boson quantum computing.

A recent work (Li, 2406.01204) considered quantum simulation of Quantum Electrodynamics (QED) on a lattice in the Coulomb gauge with gauge degrees of freedom represented in the occupation basis in momentum space. Here we consider representing the gauge degrees of freedom in field basis in position space and develop a quantum algorithm for real-time simulation. We show that the Coulomb gauge Hamiltonian is equivalent to the temporal gauge Hamiltonian when acting on physical states consisting of fermion and transverse gauge fields. The Coulomb gauge Hamiltonian guarantees that the unphysical longitudinal gauge fields do not propagate and thus there is no need to impose any constraint. The local gauge field basis and the canonically conjugate variable basis are swapped efficiently using the quantum Fourier transform. We prove that the qubit cost to represent physical states and the gate depth for real-time simulation scale polynomially with the lattice size, energy, time, accuracy and Hamiltonian parameters. We focus on the lattice theory without discussing the continuum limit or the UV completion of QED.