The standard model (SM) of particle physics represents a theoretical paradigm for the description of the fundamental forces of nature. Despite its broad applicability, the SM does not enable the description of all physically possible events. The detection of events that cannot be described by the SM, which are typically referred to as anomalous, and the related potential discovery of exotic physical phenomena is a non-trivial task. The challenge becomes even greater with next-generation colliders that will produce even more events with additional levels of complexity. The additional data complexity motivates the search for unsupervised anomaly detection methods that do not require prior knowledge about the underlying models. In this work, we develop such a technique. More explicitly, we employ a quantum generative adversarial network to identify anomalous events. The method learns the background distribution from SM data and, then, determines whether a given event is characteristic for the learned background distribution. The proposed quantum-powered anomaly detection strategy is tested on proof-of-principle examples using numerical simulations and IBM Quantum processors. We find that the quantum generative techniques using ten times fewer training data samples can yield comparable accuracy to the classical counterpart for the detection of the Graviton and Higgs particles. Additionally, we empirically compute the capacity of the quantum model and observe an improved expressivity compared to its classical counterpart.
The standard model (SM) of particle physics represents a theoretical paradigm for the description of the fundamental forces of nature. Despite its broad applicability, the SM does not enable the description of all physically possible events. The detection of events that cannot be described by the SM, which are typically referred to as anomalous, and the related potential discovery of exotic physical phenomena is a non-trivial task. The challenge becomes even greater with next-generation colliders that will produce even more events with additional levels of complexity. The additional data complexity motivates the search for unsupervised anomaly detection methods that do not require prior knowledge about the underlying models. In this work, we develop such a technique. More explicitly, we employ a quantum generative adversarial network to identify anomalous events. The method learns the background distribution from SM data and, then, determines whether a given event is characteristic for the learned background distribution. The proposed quantum-powered anomaly detection strategy is tested on proof-of-principle examples using numerical simulations and IBM Quantum processors. We find that the quantum generative techniques using ten times fewer training data samples can yield comparable accuracy to the classical counterpart for the detection of the Graviton and Higgs particles. Additionally, we empirically compute the capacity of the quantum model and observe an improved expressivity compared to its classical counterpart.
The lack of evidence for new interactions and particles at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) has motivated the high-energy physics community to explore model-agnostic data-analysis approaches to search for new physics. Autoencoders are unsupervised machine learning models based on artificial neural networks, capable of learning background distributions. We study quantum autoencoders based on variational quantum circuits for the problem of anomaly detection at the LHC. For a QCD tt background and resonant heavy-Higgs signals, we find that a simple quantum autoencoder outperforms classical autoencoders for the same inputs and trains very efficiently. Moreover, this performance is reproducible on present quantum devices. This shows that quantum autoencoders are good candidates for analysing high-energy physics data in future LHC runs.
The ongoing quest to discover new phenomena at the LHC necessitates the continuous development of algorithms and technologies. Established approaches like machine learning, along with emerging technologies such as quantum computing show promise in the enhancement of experimental capabilities. In this work, we propose a strategy for anomaly detection tasks at the LHC based on unsupervised quantum machine learning, and demonstrate its effectiveness in identifying new phenomena. The designed quantum models-an unsupervised kernel machine and two clustering algorithms-are trained to detect new-physics events using a latent representation of LHC data, generated by an autoencoder designed to accommodate current quantum hardware limitations on problem size. For kernel-based anomaly detection, we implement an instance of the model on a quantum computer, and we identify a regime where it significantly outperforms its classical counterparts. We show that the observed performance enhancement is related to the quantum resources utilised by the model. The ongoing quest in particle physics to discover fundamentally new phenomena necessitates the continuous development of algorithms and technologies. The authors propose a methodology based on quantum machine learning that can identify new phenomena in proton collision experiments, showing that it can outperform its classical counterparts when sufficient quantum computing resources are utilized.
A bstract Anomaly detection is a vital technique for exploring signatures of new physics Beyond the Standard Model (BSM) at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). The vast number of collisions generated by the LHC demands sophisticated deep learning techniques. Similarity learning, a self-supervised machine learning, detects anomalous signals by estimating their similarity to background events. In this paper, we explore the potential of quantum computers for anomaly detection through similarity learning, leveraging the power of quantum computing to enhance the known similarity learning method. In the realm of noisy intermediate-scale quantum (NISQ) devices, we employ a hybrid classical-quantum network to search for heavy scalar resonances in the di-Higgs production channel. In the absence of quantum noise, the hybrid network demonstrates improvement over the known similarity learning method. Moreover, we employ a clustering algorithm to reduce measurement noise from limited shot counts, resulting in 9% improvement in the hybrid network performance. Our analysis highlights the applicability of quantum algorithms for LHC data analysis, where improvements are anticipated with the advent of fault-tolerant quantum computers.
Abstract The prospect of quantum computing with a potential exponential speed-up compared to classical computing identifies it as a promising method in the search for alternative future High Energy Physics (HEP) simulation approaches. HEP simulations, such as employed at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, are extraordinarily complex and require an immense amount of computing resources in hardware and time. For some HEP simulations, classical machine learning models have already been successfully developed and tested, resulting in several orders of magnitude speed-up. In this research, we proceed to the next step and explore whether quantum computing can provide sufficient accuracy, and further improvements, suggesting it as an exciting direction of future investigations. With a small prototype model, we demonstrate a full quantum Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) model for generating downsized eight-pixel calorimeter shower images. The advantage over previous quantum models is that the model generates real individual images containing pixel energy values instead of simple probability distributions averaged over a test sample. To complete the picture, the results of the full quantum GAN model are compared to hybrid quantum-classical models using a classical discriminator neural network.
We investigate the possibility to apply quantum machine learning techniques for data analysis, with particular regard to an interesting use-case in high-energy physics. We propose an anomaly detection algorithm based on a parametrized quantum circuit. This algorithm was trained on a classical computer and tested with simulations as well as on real quantum hardware. Tests on NISQ devices were performed with IBM quantum computers. For the execution on quantum hardware, specific hardware-driven adaptations were devised and implemented. The quantum anomaly detection algorithm was able to detect simple anomalies such as different characters in handwritten digits as well as more complex structures such as anomalous patterns in the particle detectors produced by the decay products of long-lived particles produced at a collider experiment. For the high-energy physics application, the performance was estimated in simulation only, as the quantum circuit was not simple enough to be executed on the available quantum hardware platform. This work demonstrates that it is possible to perform anomaly detection with quantum algorithms; however, as an amplitude encoding of classical data is required for the task, due to the noise level in the available quantum hardware platform, the current implementation cannot outperform classic anomaly detection algorithms based on deep neural networks.
Anomaly detection on small and unbalanced datasets remains very challenging in machine learning, although this scenario is common in several domains, including healthcare, cybersecurity, finance, and energy. Data augmentation and generative AI may mitigate training-data scarcity, but they often fall short because anomalies are, by definition, unpredictable, rare, and highly diverse events compared to high-probability normal data. Overfitting to pseudo-anomalies, model collapse, high-dimensional data, uninterpretable black-box models, and validation challenges are typical issues limiting their practical applicability. In this context, quantum machine learning may provide a promising and more sustainable avenue because it can enable more interpretable models with far fewer trainable parameters and smaller datasets, implementable on energy-efficient quantum hardware. Here, we propose a novel two-step hybrid classical--quantum architecture for sequential data and test it on a realistic scenario in the global energy-transition domain, i.e., automated anomaly detection in large-scale photovoltaic plants. The achieved generalization capability and competitive prediction accuracy may pave the way for new hybrid learning models able to exploit the continuously increasing power of cloud-available and more sustainable quantum accelerators integrated with more traditional energy-hungry High Performance Computing resources.