Onset of thermalization of q-deformed SU(2) Yang-Mills theory on a trapped-ion quantum computer

Nonequilibrium dynamics of quantum many-body systems is one of the main targets of quantum simulations. This focus - together with rapid advances in quantum-computing hardware - has driven increasing applications in high-energy physics, particularly in lattice gauge theories. However, most existing experimental demonstrations remain restricted to (1+1)-dimensional and/or abelian gauge theories, such as the Schwinger model and the toric code. It is essential to develop quantum simulations of nonabelian gauge theories in higher dimensions, addressing realistic problems in high-energy physics. To fill the gap, we demonstrate a quantum simulation of thermalization dynamics in a (2+1)-dimensional q-deformed SU(2)₃ Yang-Mills theory using a trapped-ion quantum computer. By restricting the irreducible representations of the gauge fields to the integer-spin sector of SU(2)₃, we obtain a simplified yet nontrivial model described by Fibonacci anyons, which preserves the essential nonabelian fusion structure of the gauge fields. We successfully simulate the real-time dynamics of this model using quantum circuits that explicitly implement F-moves. In our demonstrations, the quantum circuits execute up to 47 sequential F-moves. We identify idling errors as the dominant error source, which can be effectively mitigated using dynamical decoupling combined with a parallelized implementation of F-moves.