Resource-efficient quantum simulation of lattice gauge theories in arbitrary dimensions: Solving for Gauss's law and fermion elimination

Quantum simulation of lattice gauge theories has been proposed and used as a method to overcome theoretical difficulties in dealing with the nonperturbative nature of such models. In this work we focus on two important bottlenecks that make developing such simulators hard: one is the difficulty of simulating fermionic degrees of freedom, and the other is the redundancy of the Hilbert space, which leads to a waste of experimental resources and the need to impose and monitor the local symmetry constraints of gauge theories. This has previously been tackled in one-dimensional settings, using nonlocal methods. Here we show an alternative procedure for dealing with these problems, which removes the matter and the Hilbert space redundancy, and is valid for higher space dimensions. We demonstrate it for a Z2 lattice gauge theory and implement it experimentally via the IBMQ cloud quantum computing platform.