  We study the promising idea of using dipolar molecular systems as analog
quantum simulators for quantum link models, which are discrete versions of
lattice gauge theories. In a quantum link model the link variables have a
finite number of degrees of freedom and discrete values. We construct the
effective Hamiltonian of a system of dipolar molecules with electric
dipole-dipole interactions, where we use the tunable parameters of the system
to match it to the target Hamiltonian describing a U(1) quantum link model in
1+1 dimensions.
