Simulating lattice gauge theories with Rydberg atom arrays

Gauge theories play a fundamental role in our understanding of nature, from the interactions between elementary particles to the effective description of strongly correlated systems. In recent years, there has been an immense effort to implement them in engineered quantum systems, in a quantum simulation approach. On the one hand, quantum simulators could shed new light on the equilibrium and real-time dynamics of strongly-coupled gauge theories, and be exploited as special purpose quantum computers to address open questions in high-energy physics. On the other hand, they should allow one to engineer in a highly controllable setting the effective field theories that describe exotic excitations emerging in condensed-matter systems, such as ayons or Majorana fermions, without the need for strong correlations. However, until now the quantum simulation of gauge theories has remained limited to one spatial dimension. In this new experiment, we aim at performing quantum simulations of specific lattice gauge theories in two and three spatial dimensions, using as experimental platform arrays of strontium atoms trapped in tweezer arrays of programable geometry and excited to Rydberg states.