11th International Conference on Hard and Electromagnetic Probes of High-Energy Nuclear Collisions

In recent years, a lot of effort has been put into expanding established jet-quenching formalisms to account for higher-order or energy-suppressed medium-induced effects. Understanding how such contributions emerge is important to have a more complete picture of jet evolution in the medium and to extract more detailed properties of the underlying matter. However, such efforts are in general plagued by technical difficulties related to the complexity of the calculations. In this talk, we will argue that quantum computers can be used as alternative theoretical labs to simulate jet evolution in the quark-gluon plasma. Based on the light-front Hamiltonian formalism, we construct a digital quantum circuit that tracks the evolution of a multi-particle jet probe within the $|q\rangle + |qg\rangle$ Fock sectors in the presence of a stochastic color background. Using the quantum simulation algorithm, we show that the jet evolution in the medium can be properly captured employing small lattices. Importantly, the simulations can be run in general stochastic backgrounds, surpassing many of the simplifying assumptions usually taken. We will show that the present strategy can be efficiently expanded to account for the production of multiple gluon radiations.