We develop a bottom-up approach to studying SUSY with light stops and sbottoms, but with other squarks and sleptons heavy and beyond reach of the LHC. We discuss the range of squark, gaugino and Higgsino masses for which the electroweak scale is radiatively stable over the "little hierarchy" below 10 TeV. We review and expand on indirect constraints on this scenario, in particular from flavor and CP tests. We emphasize that in this context, Rparity violation is very well motivated. The phenomenological differences between Majorana and Dirac gauginos are also discussed. Finally, we focus on the light subsystem of stops, sbottom and neutralino with R-parity, in order to probe the current collider bounds. We find that 1/fb LHC bounds are mild and large parts of the motivated parameter space remain open, while the 10/fb data can be much more decisive.

A general scheme is presented for simulating gauge theories, with matter fields, on a digital quantum computer. A Trotterized time-evolution operator that respects gauge symmetry is constructed, and a procedure for obtaining time-separated, gauge-invariant correlators is detailed. We demonstrate the procedure on small lattices, including the simulation of a 2+1D non-Abelian gauge theory.

We present a hybrid quantum-classical algorithm for the time evolution of out-of-equilibrium thermal states. The method depends upon classically computing a sparse approximation to the density matrix, and then time-evolving each matrix element via the quantum computer. For this exploratory study, we investigate the time-dependent Heisenberg model with five spins on the Rigetti Forest quantum virtual machine and a one spin system on the Rigetti 8Q-Agave quantum processor.

The discovery of two neutron stars with gravitational masses M 2 »  has placed a strong lower limit on the maximum mass of nonrotating neutron stars, and with it a strong constraint on the properties of cold matter beyond nuclear density. Current upper mass limits are much looser. Here, we note that if most short gamma-ray bursts are produced by the coalescence of two neutron stars, and if the merger remnant collapses quickly, then the upper mass limit is constrained tightly. If the rotation of the merger remnant is limited only by mass-shedding (which seems probable based on numerical studies), then the maximum gravitational mass of a nonrotating neutron star is M 2 2.2 » - if the masses of neutron stars that coalesce to produce gamma-ray bursts are in the range seen in Galactic double neutron star systems. These limits would be increased by ∼4% in the probably unrealistic case that the remnants rotate at ∼30% below mass-shedding, and by ∼15% in the extreme case that the remnants do not rotate at all. Future coincident detection of short gamma-ray bursts with gravitational waves will strengthen these arguments because they will produce tight bounds on the masses of the components for individual events. If these limits are accurate, then a reasonable fraction of double neutron star mergers might not produce gamma-ray bursts. In that case, or in the case that many short bursts are produced instead by the mergers of neutron stars with black holes, the implied rate of gravitational wave detections will be increased.

Simulations of gauge theories on quantum computers require the digitization of continuous field variables. Digitization schemes that uses the minimum amount of qubits are desirable. We present a practical scheme for digitizing SU (3) gauge theories via its discrete subgroup S(1080). The S(1080) standard Wilson action cannot be used since a phase transition occurs as the coupling is decreased, well before the scaling regime. We proposed a modified action that allows simulations in the scaling window and carry out classical Monte Carlo calculations down to lattice spacings of order a ≈ 0.08 fm. We compute a set of observables with sub-percent precision at multiple lattice spacings and show that the continuum extrapolated value agrees with the full SU (3) results. This suggests that this digitization scheme provides sufficient precision for NISQ-era QCD simulations.