Accelerated Quantum Circuit Monte-Carlo Simulation for Heavy Quark Thermalization

Abstract

Heavy quark thermalization in the quark-gluon plasma (QGP) is one of the most promising phenomena for understanding the strong interaction, where their energy loss and momentum broadening at low momentum can be well described by a stochastic process with drag and diffusion terms. We propose an accelerated quantum circuit Monte-Carlo (aQCMC) framework that ultilizes the quantum amplitude estimation (QAE) algorithm to simulate heavy quark thermalization with quadratically less resources. Specifically, we simulate the thermalization of a heavy quark in both 1D and 2D and in isotropic and anisotropic mediums using an ideal quantum simulator and compare that to analytical thermal expectations.

4 pages, 2 figures; contribution to the proceedings of the 12th Large Hadron Collider Physics Conference (LHCP2024), 3-7 June 2024, Boston, USA