<!--HTML-->A vigorous program has formed in recent years in various physics disciplines to take advantage of near-term and future quantum-simulation and quantum-computing hardware to study complex quantum many-body systems, building upon the vision of Richard Feynman. Such activities have also started in nuclear physics, hoping to bring new and powerful experimental and computational tools to address a range of challenging problems in strongly interacting nuclear many-body systems. In this talk, I review a number of important developments, including proposals for simulating strongly interacting quantum field theories, and for quantum computations of hadron and nuclear structure. The hardware technologies that are expected to enable both the analog simulations and the digital quantum computations of these problems will be enumerated, and the case for hardware co-design in the upcoming years will be motivated.
<!--HTML-->A vigorous program has formed in recent years in various physics disciplines to take advantage of near-term and future quantum-simulation and quantum-computing hardware to study complex quantum many-body systems, building upon the vision of Richard Feynman. Such activities have also started in nuclear physics, hoping to bring new and powerful experimental and computational tools to address a range of challenging problems in strongly interacting nuclear many-body systems. In this talk, I review a number of important developments, including proposals for simulating strongly interacting quantum field theories, and for quantum computations of hadron and nuclear structure. The hardware technologies that are expected to enable both the analog simulations and the digital quantum computations of these problems will be enumerated, and the case for hardware co-design in the upcoming years will be motivated.
Lattice field theory, along with its algorithmic and hardware ecosystems, has been at the forefront of computational particle and nuclear physics. It continues to deliver impressive results on the hadronic spectrum, structure, decays, and reactions. Yet, this vigorous campaign has fallen short in addressing a range of problems involving dense matter and general dynamical phenomena. The reason is that such problems require an exponential scaling of computing time and space in system size. Quantum simulation, enabled by quantum-computing algorithms and hardware technology, promises a way forward by offering several polynomially efficient algorithms compared with their inefficient classical counterparts. Lattice gauge theorists have engaged in a multi-pronged program to leverage such new possibilities, and have steadily advanced the state of theory, algorithm, and hardware implementations and co-design. In this talk, I motivate the quantum-computational lattice-field-theory program; introduce the questions such a program is expected to address and the strategies it involves; report on recent progress; and end with a note on challenges and opportunities ahead.
Lattice field theory, along with its algorithmic and hardware ecosystems, has been at the forefront of computational particle and nuclear physics. It continues to deliver impressive results on the hadronic spectrum, structure, decays, and reactions. Yet, this vigorous campaign has fallen short in addressing a range of problems involving dense matter and general dynamical phenomena. The reason is that such problems require an exponential scaling of computing time and space in system size. Quantum simulation, enabled by quantum-computing algorithms and hardware technology, promises a way forward by offering several polynomially efficient algorithms compared with their inefficient classical counterparts. Lattice gauge theorists have engaged in a multi-pronged program to leverage such new possibilities, and have steadily advanced the state of theory, algorithm, and hardware implementations and co-design. In this talk, I motivate the quantum-computational lattice-field-theory program; introduce the questions such a program is expected to address and the strategies it involves; report on recent progress; and end with a note on challenges and opportunities ahead.
Simulating quantum many-body systems is a key application for emerging quantum processors. While analog quantum simulation has already demonstrated quantum advantage, its digital counterpart has recently become the focus of intense research interest due to the availability of devices that aim to realize general-purpose quantum computers. In this perspective, we give a selective overview of the currently pursued approaches, review the advances in digital quantum simulation by comparing non-variational with variational approaches and identify hardware and algorithmic challenges. Based on this review, the question arises: What are the most promising problems that can be tackled with digital quantum simulation? We argue that problems of a qualitative nature are much more suitable for near-term devices then approaches aiming purely for a quantitative accuracy improvement.
Description of quantum many-body dynamics is extremely challenging on classical computers, as it requires taking into account many degrees of freedom. In nuclear physics, this translates on a large number of break up channels that have to be taken into account depending on available energy. Even using classical computing exascale capabilities will not allow a full description of dynamical processes starting from internucleon interactions beyond drastic approximations. On the other hand, the dynamics can be naturally implemented on quantum hardware that is designed to easily handle unitary transformations, and hence the hope that in the future we will be able to obtain reaction observables from first principles. In this contribution, I describe the main steps involved in quantum algorithms and review our efforts to apply quantum computing to the nuclear many-body problem using realistic inter-nucleon interactions.
We review recent advances in particle physics enabled and motivated by the rapid progress of quantum technologies. The continued development of quantum computing toward large-scale, fault-tolerant systems has the potential to address dynamical problems that remain extremely challenging for classical computational approaches, opening new avenues for studying nonperturbative dynamical processes. Tabletop detectors and quantum-enhanced technologies have reached unprecedented sensitivities, enabling novel searches for ultralight particles, gravitational waves, and other physics beyond the Standard Model in parameter regimes previously inaccessible to conventional instrumentation. Taken together, these developments highlight a rapidly evolving landscape in which quantum technologies are beginning to reshape fundamental physics. We aim to synthesize recent progress and illuminate the opportunities they present for advancing particle physics in the coming years.
Nuclear physics, whose underling theory is described by quantum gauge field coupled with matter, is fundamentally important and yet is formidably challenge for simulation with classical computers. Quantum computing provides a perhaps transformative approach for studying and understanding nuclear physics. With rapid scaling-up of quantum processors as well as advances on quantum algorithms, the digital quantum simulation approach for simulating quantum gauge fields and nuclear physics has gained lots of attention. In this review, we aim to summarize recent efforts on solving nuclear physics with quantum computers. We first discuss a formulation of nuclear physics in the language of quantum computing. In particular, we review how quantum gauge fields (both Abelian and non-Abelian) and their coupling to matter field can be mapped and studied on a quantum computer. We then introduce related quantum algorithms for solving static properties and real-time evolution for quantum systems, and show their applications for a broad range of problems in nuclear physics, including simulation of lattice gauge field, solving nucleon and nuclear structures, quantum advantage for simulating scattering in quantum field theory, non-equilibrium dynamics, and so on. Finally, a short outlook on future work is given.