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

Abstract

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 $j_{\max }=\frac{1}{2}$. Because of the Umklapp processes, we only find a mode for energy diffusion. The symmetric correlator exhibits transport peak near zero frequency with a width approximately 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 $t^{-\frac{1}{2}}$ 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.

15 pages, 7 figures; v2: corrected some typos