Quantum simulation of open quantum systems in heavy-ion collisions

Understand

We present a framework to simulate the dynamics of hard probes such as heavy quarks or jets in a hot, strongly-coupled quark-gluon plasma (QGP) on a quantum computer.

• Hard probes in the QGP can be treated as open quantum systems governed in the Markovian limit by the Lindblad equation.
• However, due to large computational costs, most current phenomenological calculations of hard probes evolving in the QGP use semiclassical approximations of the quantum evolution.
• Quantum computation can mitigate these costs, and offers the potential for a fully quantum treatment with exponential speedup over classical techniques.