Zohreh Davoudi (U. Maryland)
A quantum-simulation program for QCD?

The strong force in nature, described by the quantum and relativistic framework of quantum chromodynamics or QCD, has long generated an active and growing field of research and discovery. In fact, despite its development over many decades ago, it still leaves us with plenty of exciting questions to explore in the 21st century: Can we learn the phase diagram of matter governed by strong interactions? Can we predict how matter evolves and thermalizes after energetic processes such as in the early universe or in terrestrial particle colliders? How do elementary particles in QCD, quarks and gluons, and their interactions give rise to the complex structure of a proton or a nucleus? While an extremely successful theoretical and computational program called lattice QCD has enabled a first-principles look into some properties of matter, we have yet to come up with a computationally more capable tool to predict the complex dynamics of matter from the underlying interactions. Can a large reliable (digital or analog) quantum simulator eventually enable us to study the strong force? What does a quantum simulator have to offer to simulate QCD and how far away are we from such a dream? In this talk, I will describe a vision for how we may go on a journey toward quantum simulating QCD, by taking insights from early to late developments of lattice QCD, by motivating the need for novel theoretical, algorithmic, and hardware approaches to quantum-simulating this unique problem, and by providing examples of the early steps taken to date in establishing a quantum-computational lattice-QCD program.