Staircase Prethermalization and Gauge Protection in Lattice Gauge Theories

The dynamics of lattice gauge theories is characterized by an abundance of local symmetry constraints. Although errors that break gauge symmetry appear naturally in NISQ-era quantum simulators, their influence on the gauge-theory dynamics is insufficiently investigated. In this talk, we show that a small gauge breaking of strength $lambda$ induces a staircase of long-lived prethermal plateaus. The number of prethermal plateaus increases with the number of matter fields $L$, with the last plateau being reached at a timescale $lambda^{−L/2}$, showing an intimate relation of the concomitant slowing down of dynamics with the number of local gauge constraints. By means of a Magnus expansion, we demonstrate how exact resonances between different gauge-invariant supersectors are the main reason behind the emergence of staircase prethermalization. Our results bode well for NISQ quantum devices, as they indicate that the proliferation timescale of gauge-invariance violation is counterintuitively delayed exponentially in system size. From a phenomenological perspective, our work shows how prethermal behavior is significantly enriched in models with slight breaking of local gauge invariance relative to their counterparts where a global symmetry is broken.