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Perturbation theory, irrep truncations, and state preparation methods for quantum simulations of SU(3) lattice gauge theory

Praveen Balaji, Cianán Conefrey-Shinozaki, Patrick Draper*, Jason K. Elhaderi, Drishti Gupta, Luis Hidalgo, and Andrew Lytle

  • *Contact author: pdraper@illinois.edu
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Phys. Rev. D 113, 094505 – Published 22 May, 2026

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1103/m719-7tdf

Abstract

We study methods for efficient preparation of approximate ground states of SU(3) lattice gauge theory on quantum hardware. Working in a variant of the electric basis, we introduce a refinement of the irrep truncation based on the energy density of site singlets, which provides a finer gradation of simulation complexity. Using strong-coupling perturbation theory as a guide, we develop simple ansatz circuits for ground state preparation and test them via classical simulation on small lattices, including the 2×2 plaquette lattice in d=2 and the cube in d=3. We contrast state fidelities and resource requirements of variational methods against adiabatic state preparation and introduce a method that hybridizes the two approaches. Finally, we report on the public release of ymcirc—a package of tools for building SU(3) circuits and processing measurements—and pyclebsch, a package for efficiently computing SU(N) Clebsch–Gordan coefficients.

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Corrections

23 September, 2026

Correction: Equations (C3) and (C4) did not render correctly and have been fixed.

Article Text

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Phys. Rev. D 113, 094505– Published 22 May, 2026
  • Received 2 November 2025
  • Accepted 15 April 2026
  • Corrected 23 September 2026
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