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Q: Fachverband Quantenoptik und Photonik
Q 11: Cold atoms III - optical lattices (joint session A/Q)
Q 11.1: Talk
Monday, March 5, 2018, 14:00–14:15, K 0.011
Quantum simulation of lattice gauge theories using Wilson fermions — •Torsten V. Zache1, Philipp Hauke1,2, Fred Jendrzejewski2, Florian Hebenstreit3, Markus Oberthaler2, and Jürgen Berges1 — 1Institut für Theoretische Physik, Philosophenweg 16, 69120 Heidelberg — 2Kirchhoff-Institut für Physik, Im Neuenheimer Feld 227, 69120 Heidelberg — 3Institute for Theoretical Physics, Sidlerstr. 5, CH-3012 Bern
Gauge theories play an essential role in the formulation of microscopic quantum field theories, e.g. QED or QCD. Their analytical treatment is typically limited to the perturbative regime and numerical simulations are strongly hampered by the sign problem. Recently, quantum simulators based on cold atomic gases in optical lattices have been proposed to circumvent these issues. Most proposals rely on the lattice regularization of gauge theories (LGT) via staggered fermions. Since the regularization is not unique, we propose to exploit this freedom to simplify the implementation of LGTs. We find that the choice of Wilson fermions reduces the complexity of the gauge interactions in one spatial dimension to a minimum and use this result to devise an optimized implementation of QED using a mixture of bosons and fermions in a tilted optical potential. We further perform benchmarking real-time lattice simulations with realistic experimental parameter sets, which indicate that the non-perturbative nature of electron-positron pair production due to the Schwinger mechanism can be resolved even quantitatively. We conclude that the quantum simulation of QED in the continuum limit is possible with state-of-the art technology.