Simulating QCD with quantum tools?

The strong force in nature, described by the quantum and relativistic framework of quantum chromodynamics (QCD), has long generated an active and growing field of research and discovery. In fact, despite its development over five decades ago, it still leaves us with many exciting questions to explore in the 21st century, with a multi-billion-dollar experimental investment that aims to understand the core of matter, and how matter interacts with candidates of new physics models, such as dark matter. While an extremely successful theoretical and computational program called lattice QCD has enabled a first-principles look into some properties of matter, we have yet to come up with a computationally more capable tool to predict the complex and surprising dynamics of matter from the underlying interactions. Can a large reliable (digital or analog) quantum simulator eventually enable us to study the strong force? What does a quantum simulator have to offer to simulate QCD and how far away are we from such a dream? In this talk, I will describe a vision for how we may go on a journey toward quantum simulating QCD, by motivating the need for novel theoretical, algorithmic, and hardware approaches to quantum-simulating this unique problem, and by providing examples of the early steps taken to date in establishing a quantum-computational lattice-QCD program.