Quantum computation of phase transition in the massive Schwinger model

Abstract

As pointed out by Coleman, physical quantities in the Schwinger model depend on a parameter θ that determines the background electric field. There is a phase transition for θ = π only. We develop a momentum space formalism on a lattice and use it to perform a quantum computation of the critical point of this phase transition on the NISQ device IMB Q Lima. After error mitigation, our results give strong indication of the existence of a critical point at m/e ≃ 0.32, where m is the bare fermion mass and e is the coupling strength, in good agreement with the classical numerical result m/e ≃ 0.3335.