Quantum simulation of light-front parton correlators
Miguel G. Echevarría, I. L. Egusquiza, E. Rico, G. Schnell
Abstract
The physics of high-energy colliders relies on the knowledge of different nonperturbative parton correlators, such as parton distribution functions, that encode the information on universal hadron structure and are thus the main building blocks of any factorization theorem of the underlying process in such collision. These functions are given in terms of gauge-invariant light-front operators, that are nonlocal in both space and real time, and thus intractable by standard lattice techniques due to the well-known sign problem. In this paper, we propose a quantum algorithm to perform a quantum simulation of these type of correlators, and illustrate it by considering a space-time Wilson loop. We discuss the implementation of the quantum algorithm in terms of quantum gates that are accessible within actual quantum technologies such as cold atoms setups, trapped ions or superconducting circuits.