The ambitious HL-LHC program will require enormous computing resources in the next two decades. A burning question is whether quantum computer can solve the ever growing demand of computing resources in High Energy Physics in general and physics at LHC in particular.Using IBM Quantum Computer Simulators and Quantum Computer Hardware, we have successfully employed the Quantum Support Vector Machine Method (QSVM) in applying quantum machine learning for a ttH (H to two photons), Higgs coupling to top quarks analysis at LHC.
One of the major objectives of the experimental programs at the LHC is the discovery of new physics. This requires the identification of rare signals in immense backgrounds. Using machine learning algorithms greatly enhances our ability to achieve this objective. With the progress of quantum technologies, quantum machine learning could become a powerful tool for data analysis in high energy physics. In this study, using IBM gate-model quantum computing systems, we employ the quantum variational classifier method and the quantum kernel estimator method in two recent LHC flagship physics analyses:
ttˉH (Higgs boson production in association with a top quark pair) and
H→μμ (Higgs boson decays to two muons). We have obtained early results with 10 qubits on the IBM quantum simulator and the IBM quantum hardware. On the quantum simulator, the quantum machine learning methods perform similarly to classical algorithms such as SVM (support vector machine) and BDT (boosted decision tree), which are often employed in LHC physics analyses. On the quantum hardware, the quantum machine learning methods have shown promising discrimination power, comparable to that on the quantum simulator. This study demonstrates that quantum machine learning has the ability to differentiate between signal and background in realistic physics datasets.