  We present a framework to simulate the dynamics of hard probes such as heavy
quarks or jets in a hot, strongly-coupled quark-gluon plasma (QGP) on a quantum
computer. Hard probes in the QGP can be treated as open quantum systems
governed in the Markovian limit by the Lindblad equation. However, due to large
computational costs, most current phenomenological calculations of hard probes
evolving in the QGP use semiclassical approximations of the quantum evolution.
Quantum computation can mitigate these costs, and offers the potential for a
fully quantum treatment with exponential speedup over classical techniques. We
report a simplified demonstration of our framework on IBM Q quantum devices,
and apply the Random Identity Insertion Method (RIIM) to account for CNOT
depolarization noise, in addition to measurement error mitigation. Our work
demonstrates the feasibility of simulating open quantum systems on current and
near-term quantum devices, which is of broad relevance to applications in
nuclear physics, quantum information, and other fields.
