Toward Nuclear Physics from Lattice QCD on Quantum Computers

One of the ultimate missions of lattice quantum chromodynamics (QCD) is to simulate atomic nuclei from the first principles of the strong interaction. This is an extremely hard task for current computational technology, but might be reachable in the coming quantum computing era. In this paper, we discuss the computational complexities of classical and quantum simulations of lattice QCD. It is shown that the quantum simulation scales better as a function of nucleon number and thus will outperform classical simulation for large nuclei.