Studying nature directly from quark and gluon degrees of freedom is often
computationally limited by nature's physical characteristics of exponentially growing
Hilbert spaces with particle number and sign/signal-to-noise problems. As a result,
Minkowski-space dynamics and fermionic many-body structure calculations require
exponentially large classical computing resources to provide results with necessary
precision. This leaves many systems of interest to nuclear and particle physics (finite
density systems, fragmentation functions, non-equilibrium systems etc.) intractable for
known algorithms with current and foreseeable classical computational resources.
Fortunately, there are good reasons to expect that it will be efficient to simulate
locally-interacting quantum systems with quantum systems. By leveraging their natural
capacity to represent wavefunctions and directly manipulate amplitudes rather than
probabilities, the use of quantum systems as a computational framework leads to
constructions of basic quantum field theories with resource requirements that scale
only polynomially with the precision and size of the system. In this talk, I will present an
overview of recent efforts in, and the potential for, quantum computing to address
important aspects of quantum field theories relevant to nuclear physic