Quantum computing for nuclear reactions

Description of quantum many-body dynamics is extremely challenging on classical computers, as it requires taking into account many degrees of freedom. In nuclear physics, this translates on a large number of break up channels that have to be taken into account depending on available energy. Even using classical computing exascale capabilities will not allow a full description of dynamical processes starting from internucleon interactions beyond drastic approximations. On the other hand, the dynamics can be naturally implemented on quantum hardware that is designed to easily handle unitary transformations, and hence the hope that in the future we will be able to obtain reaction observables from first principles. In this contribution, I describe the main steps involved in quantum algorithms and review our efforts to apply quantum computing to the nuclear many-body problem using realistic inter-nucleon interactions.