Abstract: Studying nature directly from fundamental degrees of freedom is often computationally limited by nature’s physical characteristics of exponentially growing Hilbert spaces with particle number and sign/signal-to-noise problems. As a result, Minkowski-space dynamics and fermionic many-body structure calculations require exponentially-large classical computing resources to provide results with necessary precision. This leaves many systems of interest to nuclear and particle physics (finite density systems, fragmentation functions, non-equilibrium systems etc.) intractable
for known algorithms with current and foreseeable classical computational resources. Fortunately, there are good reasons to expect that it will be efficient to simulate locally-interacting quantum systems with quantum systems. By leveraging their natural capacity to represent wavefunctions and directly manipulate amplitudes rather than probabilities, the use of quantum systems as a computational framework leads to constructions of basic quantum field theories with resource requirements that scale only polynomially with the precision and size of the system. In this talk, I will present an overview of recent efforts in, and the potential for, quantum computing to address important aspects of quantum field theories relevant to nuclear and particle physics.