Speaker
Description
I study the effects of a $c$-number background electric field (BEF) on $(2+1)$-dimensional QED in the staggered Hamiltonian formulation - a setting in which the standard Euclidean Monte Carlo approach suffers from a sign problem, but which remains accessible to Hamiltonian quantum simulation. After digitizing the gauge and fermionic degrees of freedom onto qubits (Gray-encoded links, Jordan-Wigner fermions) and reducing to the physical Hilbert space via Gauss' law, I prepare the groundstate using a gauge-invariant VQE built from symmetry-preserving quantum circuits. Running on realistic hardware noise models with a combination of QEM techniques (measurement error mitigation, symmetry verification, and zero-noise extrapolation), I examine three features: the BEF-induced screening phase structure (reminiscent of the Schwinger model), the change in the static-charge string tension and confinement, and - more preliminarily - the effect on chiral symmetry breaking. I discuss how the digitization scales with lattice size and gauge-field truncation, and argue that this approach offers a practical route to background-field physics in gauge theories that are otherwise obstructed by a sign problem.