Hybrid Quantum-Classical Simulation for Non-Perturbative Jet Production Dynamics at Scale with CUDA Quantum

The generation of jets in high-energy collisions probes the real-time behavior of the QCD vacuum and how it is influenced by the presence of high-momentum color charges. Addressing this challenge from a theoretical perspective necessitates a real-time, non-perturbative approach. It is worth noting that the Schwinger model (a description of QED in 1+1 dimensions) shares numerous common characteristics with QCD, such as confinement, chiral symmetry breaking, and the presence of vacuum fermion condensate. It can moreover be approximated by a many-body quantum Hamiltonian and is amenable to near-term quantum simulations.

As a significant step towards developing this approach, we present our findings from GPU-driven hybrid quantum-classical simulations of the massive Schwinger model in the presence of a pair of hard external particles. It produces a set-up similar to the one leading to the production of jets in high-energy collisions. We investigate how the presence of these propagating jets affects the vacuum chiral condensate, as well as the quantum entanglement between the jets as they fragment. This work is performed on NERSC's Perlmutter system leveraging the multi-node multi-GPU architecture using NVIDIA’s CUDA Quantum, which is a software development kit for quantum and integrated quantum-classical programming.