Session 1WC: QCD and the EIC I

Lattice QCD developments for high-precision nuclear physics

Lattice QCD has, in recent years, reached a level of maturity to provide Standard Model predictions about the structure and interactions of nucleons with precisions that can match or rival those of experiment. In this talk, I will give an overview of recent lattice QCD results relevant for nucleon and nuclear structure, and survey some of the theoretical advancements which have allowed us to understand and control systematic effects to a level of high-precision.   

QCD and Nuclear Theory at the Electron-Ion Collider

QCD has been very successful in describing the short-distance dynamics owing to its defining property - "Asymptotic Freedom". QCD's another defining property, "Confinement", makes the Theory and its emergent phenomena extremely rich at the fermi scale, opening up a new femto-science. The Electron-Ion Collider, which US Department of Energy recently approved for construction at Brookhaven National Lab, is sitting at a sweet spot for rich QCD dynamics, capable of taking us to the next frontier of Nuclear Science! In this talk, I will demonstrate that the EIC will be an ultimate QCD machine, capable of discovering and exploring the emergent phenomena of QCD and the role of color and glue at the fermi scale, and a unique and necessary facility for the "tomography" of nucleons and nuclei with unprecedented sub-femtometer resolution to help explore their internal structure and landscape in terms of quarks and gluons, which allows us to address the most compelling unanswered questions about nucleon and nuclei - the elementary building blocks of our visible world.   

Toward building 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.