Advances in quantum information science (QIS) are providing transformative insights into the complexity of quantum many-body systems, potentially defining new frontiers in nuclear and high-energy physics. This review explores how QIS-derived techniques are fostering new analytic frameworks and algorithms—both classical and quantum—to tackle (some of the) present barriers to discovery in fundamental physics, with applicability to other science domains. We highlight how these techniques are shedding new light on the structure and dynamics of hadrons, nuclei, matter in extreme conditions, and beyond. Importantly, they are expected to play an essential role in the development of large-scale quantum simulations of such systems, particularly in setting the balance among quantum and classical computational resources.

We would like to thank our colleagues, and the community more generally, for creating and discovering much of the work we have reviewed, and providing a stimulating environment in which we are able to make our contributions to this exciting field of research. We are grateful to the organizers and participants of workshops that brought together many of the ideas and themes in this area, including the 2024 IQuS workshops on Pulses, Qudits and Quantum Simulations and Entanglement in Many-Body Systems: From Nuclei to Quantum Computers and Back, as well as the First and Second International Workshops on Many-Body Quantum Magic. This work was supported, in part, by Universitat Bielefeld, by GSI Helmholtzzentrum fur Schwerionenforschung, by the Ministerium fur Kultur und Wissenschaft des Landes Nordrhein Westfalen (MKW NRW) under the funding code NW21-024-A, and by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation) through the CRC-TR 211 ‘Strong interaction matter under extreme conditions’– project number 315477589 – TRR 211 (Caroline). This work is also supported by U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Science, Office of Nuclear Physics, InQubator for Quantum Simulation (IQuS) under Award Number DOE (NP) Award DE-SC0020970 via the program on Quantum Horizons: QIS Research and Innovation for Nuclear Science, and, in part, through the Department of Physics and the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Washington (Martin).