Efficient truncations of SU(Nc) lattice gauge theory for quantum simulation

Quantum simulations of lattice gauge theories offer the potential to directly study the nonperturbative dynamics of quantum chromodynamics, but naive analyses suggest that they require large computational resources. Large Nc expansions are performed to order 1/Nc to simplify the Hamiltonian of pure SU(Nc) lattice gauge theories. A reformulation of the electric basis is introduced with a truncation strategy based on the construction of local Krylov subspaces with plaquette operators. Numerical simulations show that these truncated Hamiltonians are consistent with traditional lattice calculations at relatively small couplings. It is shown that the computational resources required for quantum simulation of time evolution generated by these Hamiltonians is 17–19 orders of magnitude smaller than previous approaches, provided that the truncations in this work can reach lattice spacings in three-dimensional simulations comparable to the two-dimensional simulations performed.