Quantum computing for plasma physics: prospects and limitations

Plasma dynamics is notoriously difficult to simulate, with state-of-the-art simulations requiring millions of CPU hours. This motivates us to explore alternative computational platforms that may speed up such simulations. Quantum computing is a potential alternative as it can solve certain problems exponentially or polynomially faster than classical computers. We will present a brief overview of quantum algorithms for scientific computation that are applicable to plasma physics. At a high level, end-to-end quantum algorithms for plasma dynamics can be broken into three separate stages: loading the initial conditions onto the quantum computer, solving the relevant equations, and extracting useful information from the solution states. We will outline recent progress in each area and highlight main limitations as well as prospects.