The surprising manifestation of collectivity in small collision systems, such as nucleon-nucleon and nucleon-nucleus collisions, is perhaps even more striking when discussed at higher momenta. In larger systems, high-energy elliptic anisotropy is understood as a selection bias effect due to the smaller energy loss experienced along the shorter direction that aligns with the event plane. However, in small systems the amount of energy loss appears insufficient to reproduce the sizable angular anisotropy observed experimentally. In this talk, I present a new mechanism generating preferred orientations for energetic particles without the need of energy loss. In the first part we exploit a toy model that is based on two basic although inalienable ingredients: geometry and quantum mechanics. We use both the stationary phase approximation, which provides transparent analytical expressions, valid for the high-energy regime, as well as an exact numerical method for an elliptical medium, valid for any momenta. Our findings suggest that this sum-over-paths mechanism can provide a relevant contribution to so-called flow coefficients of energetic particles traversing deconfined media of any size. To produce realistic phenomenology we apply the same logic to the effective description of energetic particles traversing deconfined QCD media, the standard jet quenching formalism using dressed propagators in light-cone coordinates. Crucially, we confirm that the stochasticity associated to these more realistic medium correlators does not was out the effect, presenting a strong signal that can be confronted with experiments.

Many of the most important phenomena in quantum field theory—parton dynamics, real-time evolution, and thermalization—are extremely difficult to study with conventional classical computers. Quantum computers provide a new opportunity: they allow us to simulate quantum systems by using another controllable quantum system. In this talk, I will present two recent field-theory calculations carried out on quantum computers, based on arXiv:2506.16829 and arXiv:2603.23948. The first explores parton distributions in the Schwinger model, connecting quantum simulation to the internal structure of relativistic bound states. The second investigates thermalization in SU(2) lattice gauge fields, addressing how apparently thermal behavior can emerge from unitary quantum evolution. No prior knowledge of quantum computing will be assumed; the talk will focus on the physics motivation, the basic ideas, and what these calculations teach us about real-time quantum field theory.