A key objective in nuclear and high-energy physics is to describe nonequilibrium dynamics of matter, e.g., in the early universe and in particle colliders, starting from the Standard Model. Classical-computing methods, via the framework of lattice gauge theory, have experienced limited success in this mission. Quantum simulation of lattice gauge theories holds promise for overcoming computational limitations. Because of local constraints (Gauss’s laws), lattice gauge theories have an intricate Hilbert-space structure. This structure complicates the definition of thermodynamic properties of systems coupled to reservoirs during equilibrium and nonequilibrium processes. We show how to define thermodynamic quantities such as work and heat using strong-coupling thermodynamics, a framework that has recently burgeoned within the field of quantum thermodynamics. Our definitions suit instantaneous quenches, simple nonequilibrium processes undertaken in quantum simulators. To illustrate our framework, we compute the work and heat exchanged during a quench in a $Z_2$ lattice gauge theory coupled to matter in 1+1 dimensions. The thermodynamic quantities, as functions of the quench parameter, evidence an expected phase transition.
Generally, we derive a simple relation between a quantum many-body system’s entanglement Hamiltonian, measurable with quantum-information-processing tools, and the Hamiltonian of mean force, used to define strong-coupling thermodynamic quantities.

We explore the utility of d=8 qudits, qu8its, for quantum simulations of the dynamics of 1+1D SU(3) lattice quantum chromodynamics, including a mapping for arbitrary numbers of flavors and lattice size and a re-organization of the Hamiltonian for efficient time-evolution. Recent advances in parallel gate applications, along with the shorter application times of single-qudit operations compared with two-qudit operations, lead to significant projected advantages in quantum simulation fidelities and circuit depths using qu8its rather than qubits. The number of two-qudit entangling gates required for time evolution using qu8its is found to be more than a factor of five fewer than for qubits. We anticipate that the developments presented in this work will enable improved quantum simulations to be performed using emerging quantum hardware.

Ab-initio simulations of multiple heavy quarks propagating in a Quark-Gluon Plasma are computationally difficult to perform due to the large dimension of the space of density matrices. This work develops machine learning algorithms to overcome this difficulty by approximating exact quantum states with neural network parametrisations, specifically Neural Density Operators. As a proof of principle demonstration in a QCD-like theory, the approach is applied to solve the Lindblad master equation in the 1+1D lattice Schwinger Model as an open quantum system. Neural Density Operators enable the study of in-medium dynamics on large lattice volumes, where multiple-string interactions and their effects on string-breaking and recombination phenomena can be studied. Thermal properties of the system at equilibrium can also be probed with these methods by variationally constructing the steady state of the Lindblad master equation. Scaling of this approach with system size is studied, and numerical demonstrations on up to 32 spatial lattice sites and with up to 3 interacting strings are performed.

This document summarizes the efforts of the EMMI Rapid Reaction Task Force on “Suppression and (re)generation of quarkonium in heavy-ion collisions at the LHC”, centered around their 2019 and 2022 meetings. It provides a review of existing experimental results and theoretical approaches, including lattice QCD calculations and semiclassical and quantum approaches for the dynamical evolution of quarkonia in the quark-gluon plasma as probed in high-energy heavy-ion collisions. The key ingredients of the transport models are itemized to facilitate comparisons of calculated quantities such as reaction rates, binding energies, and nuclear modification factors. A diagnostic assessment of the various results is attempted and coupled with an outlook for the future.

We perform a nonperturbative calculation of the shear viscosity for 2+1-dimensional SU(2) gauge theory by using the lattice Hamiltonian formulation. The retarded Green’s function of the stress-energy tensor is calculated from real time evolution via exact diagonalization of the lattice Hamiltonian with a local Hilbert space truncation and the shear viscosity is obtained via the Kubo formula. When taking the continuum limit, we account for the renormalization group flow of the coupling but no additional operator renormalization. We find the ratio of the shear viscosity and the entropy density eta/s is consistent with a well-known holographic result 1/(4 pi) at several temperatures on a  4×4 hexagonal lattice with the local electric representation truncated at j_max=1/2. We also find the ratio of the spectral function and frequency rho^(xy)(omega)/omega exhibits a peak structure when the frequency is small. Both exact diagonalization method and simple matrix product state classical simulation method beyond j_max=1/2 on bigger lattices require exponentially growing resources. So we develop a quantum computing method to calculate the retarded Green’s function and analyze various systematics of the calculation including j_max truncation and finite size effects and Trotter errors. We test our quantum circuit on both the Quantinuum emulator and the IBM simulator for a small lattice and obtain results consistent with the classical computing ones.

Quantum simulation holds promise of enabling a complete description of high-energy scattering processes rooted in gauge theories of the Standard Model. A first step in such simulations is preparation of interacting hadronic wave packets. To create the wave packets, one typically resorts to adiabatic evolution to bridge between wave packets in the free theory and those in the interacting theory, rendering the simulation resource intensive. In this work, we construct a wave-packet creation operator directly in the interacting theory to circumvent adiabatic evolution, taking advantage of resource-efficient schemes for ground-state preparation, such as variational quantum eigensolvers. By means of an ansatz for bound mesonic excitations in confining gauge theories, which is subsequently optimized using classical or quantum methods, we show that interacting mesonic wave packets can be created efficiently and accurately using digital quantum algorithms that we develop. Specifically, we obtain high-fidelity mesonic wave packets in the Z_2 and U(1) lattice gauge theories coupled to fermionic matter in 1+1 dimensions. Our method is applicable to both perturbative and non-perturbative regimes of couplings. The wave-packet creation circuit for the case of the Z_2 lattice gauge theory is built and implemented on the Quantinuum H1-1 trapped-ion quantum computer using 13 qubits and over 300 entangling gates. The fidelities agree well with classical benchmark calculations after employing a simple symmetry-based noise-mitigation technique. This work serves as a step toward quantum computing scattering processes in quantum chromodynamics.

We study the entanglement entropy of Hamiltonian SU(2) lattice gauge theory in 2+1 dimensions on linear plaquette chains and show that the entanglement entropies of both ground and excited states follow Page curves. The transition of the subsystem size dependence of the entanglement entropy from the area law for the ground state to the volume law for highly excited states is found to be described by a universal crossover function. Quantum many-body scars in the middle of the spectrum, which are present in the electric flux truncated Hilbert space, where the gauge theory can be mapped onto an Ising model, disappear when higher electric field representations are included in the Hilbert space basis. This suggests the continuum 2+1-dimensional SU(2) gauge theory is a “fast” scrambler.

Hadron wavepackets are prepared and time evolved in the Schwinger model using 112 qubits of IBM’s 133-qubit Heron quantum computer ibm_torino. The initialization of the hadron wavepacket is performed in two steps. First, the vacuum is prepared across the whole lattice using the recently developed SC-ADAPT-VQE algorithm and workflow. SC-ADAPT-VQE is then extended to the preparation of localized states, and used to establish a hadron wavepacket on top of the vacuum. This is done by adaptively constructing low-depth circuits that maximize the overlap with an adiabatically prepared hadron wavepacket. Due to the localized nature of the wavepacket, these circuits can be determined on a sequence of small lattices using classical computers, and then robustly scaled to prepare wavepackets on large lattices for simulations using quantum computers. Time evolution is implemented with a second-order Trotterization. To reduce both the required qubit connectivity and circuit depth, an approximate quasi-local interaction is introduced. This approximation is made possible by the emergence of confinement at long distances, and converges exponentially with increasing distance of the interactions. Using multiple error-mitigation strategies, up to 14 Trotter steps of time evolution are performed, employing 13,858 two-qubit gates (with a CNOT depth of 370).  The propagation of hadrons is clearly identified, with results that compare favorably with Matrix Product State simulations. Prospectsfor a near-term quantum advantage in simulations of hadron scattering are discussed.

We review recent progress in understanding quarkonium dynamics inside the quark-gluon plasma as an open quantum system with a focus on the definition and nonperturbative calculations of relevant transport coefficients and generalized gluon distributions.

We report on progress in the nonperturbative understanding of quarkonium dynamics inside a thermal plasma. The time evolution of small-size quarkonium is governed by two-point correlation functions of chromoelectric fields dressed with an adjoint Wilson line, known in this context as generalized gluon distributions (GGDs). The GGDs have been calculated in both weakly and strongly coupled plasmas by using perturbative and holographic methods. Strikingly, the results of our calculations for a strongly coupled plasma indicate that the quarkonium dissociation and recombination rates vanish in the transport descriptions that assume quarkonium undergoes Markovian dynamics. However, this does not imply that the dynamics is trivial. As a starting point to explore the phenomenological consequences of the result at strong coupling, we show a calculation of the $\Upsilon(1S)$ formation probability in time-dependent perturbation theory. This is a first step towards the development of a transport formalism that includes non-Markovian effects, which, depending on how close the as of yet undetermined nonperturbative QCD result of the GGDs is to the strongly coupled $\mathcal{N}=4$ SYM result, could very well dominate over the Markovian ones in quark-gluon plasma produced at RHIC and the LHC.