Physics in the NISQ era: opportunities for high energy and nuclear physics

Colloquium with Dr. Niklas Mueller, Postdoc at the Maryland Center for Fundamental Physics and the Joint Quantum Institute

Physics in the NISQ era: opportunities for high energy and nuclear physics

The possibility to simulate quantum many-body systems with digital quantum computers and analog devices is an exciting opportunity for high energy and nuclear physics. However, over the next five to ten years (the noisy ‘NISQ era’), we will be forced to explore simpler models short of the ultimate goal: Quantum Chromodynamics (QCD). I will argue that, utilizing interdisciplinary connections, exciting physics problems lie nevertheless directly ahead and new perspectives are waiting to be investigated. One example is Entanglement Structure (ES), first explored in the context of non-Abelian fractional quantum Hall states, but largely unexplored for gauge theories and high energy and nuclear physics. ES is crucial e.g., to understand thermalization of the quark gluon plasma in ultra-relativistic heavy ion collisions, or the structure of QCD bound states in deeply inelastic scattering (DIS) at the future Electron-Ion Collider. To illustrate this, I will show how I used Entanglement Structure and Entanglement Tomography to gain insight into quantum thermalization of strongly-coupled gauge theories, which proceeds in characteristic stages and reveals quantum phenomena remarkably similar to their classical counterparts: chaos, turbulence and universality. I will also report on current developments, and I will lay out a physics program making use of interdisciplinary connections between high energy and nuclear physics, condensed matter theory and quantum information science.