We construct a toy model of a nucleon, in which three static quarks interact via a SU(3) gauge field on a planar honeycomb lattice. The dynamics of the gauge field is described by the Kogut-Susskind Hamiltonian, truncated to the lowest three SU(3) irreducible representations. We show that the internal structure of the toy nucleon reflects salient features of the physical nucleon state. We then find the entanglement entropy of the gauge field within the nucleon state and compute its time evolution after a quench, in which all three valence quarks are suddenly removed. We show that the entanglement entropy in the final state is dominated by the dynamically generated contribution rather than that in the initial state.

We analyze the emergence of nonlocal magic in Schwinger pair creation in strong non-Abelian (chromo)electric fields using holography. The produced quark–antiquark pair is entangled into a color singlet, yet accelerates into causally disconnected Rindler wedges. Using the Casini–Huerta–Myers conformal mapping and the probe-brane framework, we compute the refined Renyi entropy and its derivative, which captures the antiflatness of the entanglement spectrum for a spherical bipartition. We find that for boundary spacetime dimension d>2, the entanglement spectrum is non-flat, implying the dynamical generation of nonlocal magic in the pair creation process. Interestingly, the nonlocal magic in the holographic dual can be obtained from the free energy of the probe action.

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).

We compute the entanglement entropy and the entanglement spectrum of the vacuum state in the massive Schwinger model at a finite theta angle. The theta term is implemented through a chirally rotated lattice Hamiltonian that preserves the periodicity in theta already at the operator level and maintains the correct massless limit without theta-dependent lattice artifacts. The physical origin of entanglement entropy enhancement at theta=pi is clarified by relating it to the competition between distinct electric-flux vacuum branches. We show that the peak near theta=pi persists across the range of masses studied and corresponds to the point of maximal competition between distinct vacuum branches with opposite electric-field orientation, where quantum fluctuations due to fermion pair creation are maximized. While this entropy enhancement is generic, a pronounced narrowing of the entanglement gap occurs only near the critical mass ratio m/g ~ 0.33. Using the Bisognano–Wichmann (BW) theorem, we construct a lattice BW entanglement Hamiltonian and compare it with the exact modular Hamiltonian obtained from the reduced density matrix. We observe agreement between these Hamiltonians in the infrared sector, indicating that the entanglement Hamiltonian is well approximated by a spatially weighted microscopic Hamiltonian. These results establish entanglement observables as sensitive probes of the theta-dependent vacuum structure and highlight the chirally-rotated formulation as a natural framework for open boundary conditions. Additionally, we discuss possible applications to entanglement in topological insulators and quantum wires.

We simulate the thermalization dynamics for minimally truncated SU(2) pure gauge theory on linear plaquette chains with up to 151 plaquettes using IBM quantum computers. We study the time dependence of the entanglement spectrum, Renyi-2 entropy and anti-flatness on small subsystems. The quantum hardware results obtained after error mitigation agree with extrapolated classical simulator results for chains consisting of up to 101 plaquettes. Our results demonstrate the feasibility of local thermalization studies for chaotic quantum systems, such as non-Abelian lattice gauge theories, on current noisy quantum computing platforms.

A scattering event in a quantum field theory is a coherent superposition of all processes consistent with its symmetries and kinematics. While real-time simulations have progressed toward resolving individual channels, existing approaches rely on knowledge of the asymptotic particle wavefunctions. This work introduces an experimentally inspired method to isolate scattering channels in Matrix Product State simulations based on the entanglement structure of the late-time wavefunction. Schmidt decompositions at spatial bipartitions of the post-scattering state identify elastic and inelastic contributions, enabling deterministic detection of outgoing particles of specific species. This method may be used in settings beyond scattering and is applied to detect heavy particles produced in a collision in the one-dimensional Ising field theory. Natural extensions to quantum simulations of other systems and higher-order processes are discussed.

String breaking is at the core of hadronization models of relevance to particle colliders. Yet, studies of string-breaking dynamics rooted in quantum chromodynamics remain fundamentally challenging. Tensor networks enable sign-problem-free studies of static and dynamical properties of lattice gauge theories (LGTs). In this work, we develop and apply a tensor-network toolkit based on the loop-string-hadron (LSH) formulation of an SU(2) LGT in 1+1 dimensions with dynamical quarks. We apply this toolkit to study static and dynamical aspects of strings and their breaking in this theory. The simple, gauge-invariant, and local structure of the LSH states and constraints removes the need to impose non-Abelian constraints in the algorithm, and allows for a systematic computation of observables at increasingly large bosonic cutoffs, and toward the infinite-volume and continuum limits. Our study of static strings yields a determination of the string tension in the continuum and thermodynamic limits. Our study of dynamical string breaking illuminates underlying processes at play during the quench dynamics of a string. The loop, string, and hadron description offers a systematic and intuitive way to diagnose these processes, including string expansion and contraction, endpoint splitting and particle shower, chain scattering events, and inelastic processes resulting from string dissociation and recombination, and particle production. We relate these processes to several features of the dynamics, such as energy transport, entanglement-entropy production, and correlation spreading. This work opens the way to future tensor-network studies of string breaking and particle production in increasingly complex LGTs.

Three-dimensional Weyl materials provide a controlled setting for exploring Floquet dynamics in open quantum systems, including nonequilibrium steady states (NESS). Motivated by the desire for a strongly-coupled description, we employ holography to analyze the formation and stability of a NESS in a Weyl semi-metal induced by an external circularly polarized electric field. A time-periodic steady-state solution is constructed and its stability is determined from the spectrum of out-of-equilibrium quasinormal modes (Floquet exponents). A stable region in the drive parameter space is identified; beyond a critical curve, the Floquet exponents enter the upper half of the complex plane, leading to a superharmonic response. At sufficiently strong driving, chaotic time evolution emerges in the fully nonlinear initial-boundary value problem. The anomaly-induced response of the NESS to an external magnetic field is also computed, and the resulting behavior is related to the previously proposed chiral pumping effect.

String breaking, the process by which flux tubes fragment into hadronic states, is a hallmark of confinement in strongly-interacting quantum field theories. We examine a suite of quantum complexity measures using Matrix Product States to dissect the string breaking process in the 1+1D Schwinger model. We demonstrate the presence of nonlocal quantum correlations along the string that may affect fragmentation dynamics, and show that entanglement and magic offer complementary perspectives on string formation and hadronization beyond conventional observables.

We would like to thank Roland Farrell, Henry Froland, Tobias Haug, Dima Kharzeev, Eliana Marroquin and
Caroline Robin for helpful discussions. This work was supported, in part, 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. Sebastian was supported in part by the U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Science, Office of Nuclear Physics, Grants No. DE-FG02-97ER-41014 and in part by a Feodor Lynen Research fellowship of the Alexander von Humboldt foundation. This work was also supported, in part, by the Department of Physics and the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Washington. This work was enabled, in part, by the use of advanced computational, storage and networking infrastructure provided by the Hyak supercomputer system at the University of Washington. This research used resources of the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC), a Department of Energy Office of Science User Facility using NERSC award NP-ERCAP0032083. This research was done using services provided by the OSG Consortium, which is supported by the National Science Foundation awards #2030508 and #1836650. We have made use of the ITensor library for tensor network computations.

We study SU(3) gauge theory on small lattices in the minimal (qutrit) electric field truncation retaining only the 1, 3, 3bar representations for the link variables. Explicit expressions are given for the Kogut-Susskind Hamiltonian for the square plaquette chain and the two-dimensional honeycomb lattice. Our formalism can be easily extended to the minimally truncated general SU(Nc) gauge theory. The addition of (static) quarks is discussed. We present results for the energy spectrum of the gauge field on these lattices by exact diagonalization of the Hamiltonian and analyze its statistical properties. We also compute the SU(3) string tension and discuss how it is modified by vacuum fluctuations. Finally, we calculate the potential energies of a static quark-antiquark pair and three static quarks and study their screening at finite temperature.