Quantum and classical simulation of High Energy Physics

Christine A. Muschik

Sau Lan Wu, J. Chan, Alkaid Cheng +17 more

Machine learning enjoys widespread success in High Energy Physics (HEP) analyses at LHC. However the ambitious HL-LHC program will require much more computing resources in the next two decades. Quantum computing may offer speed-up for HEP physics analyses at HL-LHC, and can be a new computational paradigm for big data analyses in High Energy Physics. We have successfully employed three methods (1) Variational Quantum Classifier (VQC) method, (2) Quantum Support Vector Machine Kernel (QSVM-kernel) method and (3) Quantum Neural Network (QNN) method for two LHC flagship analyses: ttH (Higgs production in association with two top quarks) and H->mumu (Higgs decay to two muons, the second generation fermions). We shall address the progressive improvements in performance from method (1) to method (3). We will present our experiences and results of a study on LHC High Energy Physics data analyses with IBM Quantum Simulator and Quantum Hardware (using IBM Qiskit framework), Google Quantum Simulator (using Google Cirq framework), and Amazon Quantum Simulator (using Amazon Braket cloud service). The work is in the context of a Qubit platform (a gate-model quantum computer). Taking into account the present limitation of hardware access, different quantum machine learning methods are studied on simulators and the results are compared with classical machine learning methods (BDT, classical Support Vector Machine and classical Neural Network). Furthermore, we do apply quantum machine learning on IBM quantum hardware to compare performance between quantum simulator and quantum hardware. The work is performed by an international and interdisciplinary collaboration with the Department of Physics and Department of Computer Sciences of University of Wisconsin, CERN Quantum Technology Initiative, IBM Research Zurich, IBM T.J. Watson Research Center, Fermilab Quantum Institute, BNL Computational Science Initiative, State University of New York at Stony Brook, and Quantum Computing and AI Research of Amazon Web Services. This work pioneers a close collaboration of academic institutions with industrial corporations in the High Energy Physics analyses effort. Though the size of event samples in future HL-LHC physics and the limited number of qubits pose some challenges to the Quantum Machine learning studies for High Energy Physics, more advanced quantum computers with larger number of qubits, reduced noise and improved running time (as envisioned by IBM and Google) may outperform classical machine learning in both classification power and in speed. Although the era of efficient quantum computing may still be years away, we have made promising progress and obtained preliminary results in applying quantum machine learning to High Energy Physics. A PROOF OF PRINCIPLE.

Erez Zohar

Rolando D. Somma, Gerardo Ortíz, Cristian D. Batista +1 more

Jim Kowalkowski, A. L. Lyon

In this white paper, we describe characteristics of tools for classical simulations of quantum computational devices appropriate for High Energy Physics applications.

Yujiang Bi, Lu Wang, Wei Sun +1 more

With the dramatic growth of experimental data in high-energy physics and the increasing demand for accuracy of physical analysis results, the current classical computing model and computing power can no longer meet the needs of data processing and analysis. As a new computing device with great potential, quantum computers have become one of the possible ways to solve the bottleneck of high-energy physics data processing and computation, though quantum computers are still far away from general computing. At such a stage that quantum computers have so many shortcomings like few physical qubits, short coherent time, and poor fidelity to solve most of practical problems, it's necessary to build a development and simulation platform using classical computers to accelerate research on quantum algorithms and applications. We've set up an interactive development platform for quantum algorithms research and quantum computing simulation, and are preparing one web portal for public education and training on quantum computing. In the future, we will pay more attention to quantum computing applications in HEP and QCD simulation.