Reliability of lattice gauge theories

Understand

Currently, there are intense experimental efforts to realize lattice gauge theories in quantum simulators.

• Except for specific models, however, practical quantum simulators can never be fine-tuned to perfect local gauge invariance.
• There is thus a strong need for a rigorous understanding of gauge-invariance violation and how to reliably protect against it.
• As we show through analytic and numerical evidence, in the presence of a gauge invariance-breaking term the gauge violation accumulates only perturbatively at short times before proliferating only at very long times.