Energy spectrum and time evolution of a SU(2) pure gauge lattice theory on a quantum annealer

Lattice gauge theory is an indispensable tool for non-Abelian fields, such as those in quantum chromodynamics where lattice results have been of central importance for several decades. Recent studies suggest that quantum hardware could extend the reach of lattice gauge theory to inaccessible phenomena due to the need for an exponentially large amount of resources, the so-called sign problem.
Among the available quantum hardware gate-based quantum computer are well know but less common quantum annealer can play a role too. In this talk we briefly report one of the first use of D-Wave quantum annealer to study the energy spectrum and the time evolution of a SU(2) pure gauge lattice theory in its Hamiltonian formulation. In particular we present how to extract the energy spectrum using the quantum Quantum Annealer Eigensolver algorithm and perform the time evolution using the Kitaev-Feynman clock states. Despite the nosy hardware, no error mitigation techniques were needed but the usability of the D-Wave hardware was extended by simply block-diagonalizing the Hamiltonian.