Physics

A vibrant program has formed in recent years in various scientific disciplines to take advantage of near-term and future quantum-simulation and quantum-computing hardware to study complex quantum many-body systems, building upon the vision of Richard Feynman for quantum simulation. Such activities have recently started in nuclear and particle physics, hoping to bring new and powerful experimental and computational tools to eventually address a range of challenging problems in strongly interacting quantum field theories and nuclear many-body systems. In this talk, I review a number of important developments, including proposals for simulating strongly interacting field theories with the ultimate goal of studying strong dynamics of quarks and gluons, and of nucleons. Some of the requirements for hardware technologies that are expected to enable both the analog simulations and the digital quantum computations of these problems will be enumerated, and an experiment-theory co-development program will be motivated with an emphasis on trapped-ion platforms.

The DAMIC experiment exploits the exceptional energy and spatial resolution of charge coupled devices (CCDs) to search for dark matter particles. We present the latest results from the 11 kg-day
exposure collected with the DAMIC detector at SNOLAB. We build on previous analyses to distinguish between bulk and surface backgrounds to construct a robust radioactive background model down to energies as low as 50 eV. We compare the observed spectrum of events to the background-model prediction to search for an excess bulk signal, as would be expected from dark matter.