High-energy physics is facing a daunting computing challenge with the large amount of data expected from the HL-LHC and other future colliders. In addition, the landscape of computation has been expanding dramatically with technologies beyond the standard x86 CPU architecture becoming increasingly available. Both of these factors necessitate an extensive and broad-ranging research and development campaign. As quantum computation has been evolving rapidly over the past few years, it is important to evaluate how quantum computation could be one potential avenue for development for future collider experiments. A wide variety of applications have been considered by different authors. We review here selected applications of quantum computing to high-energy physics, including topics in simulation, reconstruction, and the use of machine learning, and their challenges. In addition, recent advances in quantum computing technology to enhance such applications are briefly highlighted. Finally, we will discuss how such applications might transform the workflows of future collider experiments and highlight other potential applications.
High-energy physics is facing a daunting computing challenge with the large amount of data expected from the HL-LHC and other future colliders. In addition, the landscape of computation has been expanding dramatically with technologies beyond the standard x86 CPU architecture becoming increasingly available. Both of these factors necessitate an extensive and broad-ranging research and development campaign. As quantum computation has been evolving rapidly over the past few years, it is important to evaluate how quantum computation could be one potential avenue for development for future collider experiments. A wide variety of applications have been considered by different authors. We review here selected applications of quantum computing to high-energy physics, including topics in simulation, reconstruction, and the use of machine learning, and their challenges. In addition, recent advances in quantum computing technology to enhance such applications are briefly highlighted. Finally, we will discuss how such applications might transform the workflows of future collider experiments and highlight other potential applications.
Some of the biggest achievements of the modern era of particle physics, such as the discovery of the Higgs boson, have been made possible by the tremendous effort in building and operating large-scale experiments like the Large Hadron Collider or the Tevatron. In these facilities, the ultimate theory to describe matter at the most fundamental level is constantly probed and verified. These experiments often produce large amounts of data that require storing, processing, and analysis techniques that often push the limits of traditional information processing schemes. Thus, the High-Energy Physics (HEP) field has benefited from advancements in information processing and the development of algorithms and tools for large datasets. More recently, quantum computing applications have been investigated in an effort to understand how the community can benefit from the advantages of quantum information science. In this manuscript, we provide an overview of the state-of-the-art applications of quantum computing to data analysis in HEP, discuss the challenges and opportunities in integrating these novel analysis techniques into a day-to-day analysis workflow, and whether there is potential for a quantum advantage.
Quantum computing applications are an emerging field in high-energy physics. Its ambitious fusion with artificial intelligence is expected to deliver significant efficiency gains over existing methods and/or enable computation from a fundamentally different perspective. High-energy physics is a big data science that utilizes large-scale facilities, detectors, high-performance computing, and its worldwide networks. The experimental workflow consumes a significant amount of computing resources, and its annual cost will continue to grow exponentially at future colliders. In particular, pattern recognition is one of the most crucial and computationally intensive tasks. Three types of quantum computing technologies, i.e., quantum gates, quantum annealing, and quantum-inspired, are all actively investigated for high-energy physics applications, and each has its pros and cons. This article reviews the current status of quantum computing applications for pattern recognition at high-energy colliders.
Some of the most significant achievements of the modern era of particle physics, such as the discovery of the Higgs boson, have been made possible by the tremendous effort in building and operating large-scale experiments like the Large Hadron Collider or the Tevatron. In these facilities, the ultimate theory to describe matter at the most fundamental level is constantly probed and verified. These experiments often produce large amounts of data that require storing, processing, and analysis techniques that continually push the limits of traditional information processing schemes. Thus, the High-Energy Physics (HEP) field has benefited from advancements in information processing and the development of algorithms and tools for large datasets. More recently, quantum computing applications have been investigated to understand how the community can benefit from the advantages of quantum information science. Nonetheless, to unleash the full potential of quantum computing, there is a need to understand the quantum behavior and, thus, scale up current algorithms beyond what can be simulated in classical processors. In this work, we explore potential applications of quantum machine learning to data analysis tasks in HEP and how to overcome the limitations of algorithms targeted for Noisy Intermediate-Scale Quantum (NISQ) devices.
Quantum computing as emerging technology raises high expectations to accelerate complicated calculations, superseding capabilities of presently available supercomputers and to provide a solution to the ever-increasing challenge of processing big amount of data. Besides theoretical promises, quantum computers have successfully been realized in experimental settings during the past few years, and can now also be accessed commercially. Given this availability of quantum computers, their application potential can be scrutinized. Promised to lead to disruptive changes in addressing and solving problems from the domains of simulation, optimization and machine learning, quantum computers have been researched in context of many application scenarios in industrial and academic setting in the recent years. However, it turns out that currently available quantum computers are still to small in size and limited in quality to fulfill the high hopes set in them at the moment. This review reflects on the current state of the technology coming from the perspective of the application, and indicates the developments required on hardware, software and algorithmic side to eventually make quantum computing beneficial for applications.
Quantum computers offer an intriguing path for a paradigmatic change of computing in the natural sciences and beyond, with the potential for achieving a so-called quantum advantage—namely, a significant (in some cases exponential) speedup of numerical simulations. The rapid development of hardware devices with various realizations of qubits enables the execution of small-scale but representative applications on quantum computers. In particular, the high-energy physics community plays a pivotal role in accessing the power of quantum computing, since the field is a driving source for challenging computational problems. This concerns, on the theoretical side, the exploration of models that are very hard or even impossible to address with classical techniques and, on the experimental side, the enormous data challenge of newly emerging experiments, such as the upgrade of the Large Hadron Collider. In this Roadmap paper, led by CERN, DESY, and IBM, we provide the status of high-energy physics quantum computations and give examples of theoretical and experimental target benchmark applications, which can be addressed in the near future. Having in mind hardware with about 100 qubits capable of executing several thousand two-qubit gates, where possible, we also provide resource estimates for the examples given using error-mitigated quantum computing. The ultimate declared goal of this task force is therefore to trigger further research in the high-energy physics community to develop interesting use cases for demonstrations on near-term quantum computers.
Quantum computers offer an intriguing path for a paradigmatic change of computing in the natural sciences and beyond, with the potential for achieving a so-called quantum advantage—namely, a significant (in some cases exponential) speedup of numerical simulations. The rapid development of hardware devices with various realizations of qubits enables the execution of small-scale but representative applications on quantum computers. In particular, the high-energy physics community plays a pivotal role in accessing the power of quantum computing, since the field is a driving source for challenging computational problems. This concerns, on the theoretical side, the exploration of models that are very hard or even impossible to address with classical techniques and, on the experimental side, the enormous data challenge of newly emerging experiments, such as the upgrade of the Large Hadron Collider. In this Roadmap paper, led by CERN, DESY, and IBM, we provide the status of high-energy physics quantum computations and give examples of theoretical and experimental target benchmark applications, which can be addressed in the near future. Having in mind hardware with about 100 qubits capable of executing several thousand two-qubit gates, where possible, we also provide resource estimates for the examples given using error-mitigated quantum computing. The ultimate declared goal of this task force is therefore to trigger further research in the high-energy physics community to develop interesting use cases for demonstrations on near-term quantum computers. Published by the American Physical Society 2024