Quantum Computing Hadron Fragmentation Functions in Light-Front Chromodynamics
arXiv:2510.18869
The paper introduces a quantum‑simulation framework based on light‑front QCD to compute hadron fragmentation functions from first principles, and demonstrates it by calculating the charm‑to‑charmonium fragmentation probability.
Abstract
We deploy Quantum Chromodynamics (QCD) in Light-front Quantization (and Gauge), discretized and truncated in both Fock -- and momentum -- spaces with a particle-register encoding suited for quantum simulation; we show for the first time how to calculate fragmentation functions, a problem heretofore untractable in general from \emph{ab-initio} approaches. We provide a classical-simulator based proof-of-concept by computing the charm-to-charmonium fragmentation, , in a simplified setup, an interesting case where we can (reasonably) compare with the known 1993 perturbative evaluation within Nonrelativistic QCD.
4 pages, 2 figures, 9 pages and 6 figures supplementary material. To be published in Physical Review D