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Physical Review Research

Quantum magic and computational complexity in the neutrino sector

Ivan A. Chernyshev, Caroline Robin, Martin J. Savage A

Published Jun 4, 2025• 23 citations
Publisher

Abstract

We consider the quantum magic in systems of dense neutrinos undergoing coherent flavor transformations, relevant for supernova and neutron-star binary mergers. Mapping the three-flavor-neutrino system to qutrits, the evolution of quantum magic is explored in the single scattering angle limit for a selection of initial tensor-product pure states for N ν ≤ 8 neutrinos. For | ν e 〉 ⊗ N ν initial states, the magic, as measured by the α = 2 stabilizer Renyi entropy M 2 , is found to decrease with radial distance from the neutrino sphere, reaching a value that lies below the maximum for tensor-product qutrit states. Further, the asymptotic magic per neutrino, M 2 / N ν , decreases with increasing N ν . In contrast, the magic evolving from states containing all three flavors reaches values only possible with entanglement, with the asymptotic M 2 / N ν increasing with N ν . These results highlight the connection between the complexity in simulating quantum physical systems and the parameters of the Standard Model.

DOI
10.1103/physrevresearch.7.023228

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We consider the quantum magic in systems of dense neutrinos undergoing coherent flavor transformations, relevant for supernova and neutron-star binary mergers. Mapping the three-flavor-neutrino system to qutrits, the evolution of quantum magic is explored in the single scattering angle limit for a selection of initial tensor-product pure states for N ν ≤ 8 neutrinos. For | ν e 〉 ⊗ N ν initial states, the magic, as measured by the α = 2 stabilizer Renyi entropy M 2 , is found to decrease with radial distance from the neutrino sphere, reaching a value that lies below the maximum for tensor-product qutrit states. Further, the asymptotic magic per neutrino, M 2 / N ν , decreases with increasing N ν . In contrast, the magic evolving from states containing all three flavors reaches values only possible with entanglement, with the asymptotic M 2 / N ν increasing with N ν . These results highlight the connection between the complexity in simulating quantum physical systems and the parameters of the Standard Model.
We consider the quantum magic in systems of dense neutrinos undergoing coherent flavor transformations, relevant for supernova and neutron-star binary mergers. Mapping the three-flavor-neutrino system to qutrits, the evolution of quantum magic is explored in the single scattering angle limit for a selection of initial tensor-product pure states for Nν≤8N_ν\le 8Nν​≤8 neutrinos. For ∣νe⟩⊗Nν|ν_e\rangle^{\otimes N_ν}∣νe​⟩⊗Nν​ initial states, the magic, as measured by the α=2α=2α=2 stabilizer Renyi entropy M2M_2M2​, is found to decrease with radial distance from the neutrino sphere, reaching a value that lies below the maximum for tensor-product qutrit states. Further, the asymptotic magic per neutrino, M2/NνM_2/N_νM2​/Nν​, decreases with increasing NνN_νNν​. In contrast, the magic evolving from states containing all three flavors reaches values only possible with entanglement, with the asymptotic M2/NνM_2/N_νM2​/Nν​ increasing with NνN_νNν​. These results highlight the connection between the complexity in simulating quantum physical systems and the parameters of the Standard Model.
The extraordinary neutrino flux produced in extreme astrophysical environments like the early Universe, core-collapse supernovae and neutron star mergers may produce coherent quantum neutrino oscillations on macroscopic length scales. The Hamiltonian describing this evolution can be mapped into quantum spin models with all-to-all couplings arising from neutrino-neutrino forward scattering. To date many studies of these oscillations have been performed in a mean-field limit where the neutrinos time evolve in a product state. In this paper we examine a simple two-beam model evolving from an initial product state and compare the mean-field and many-body evolution. The symmetries in this model allow us to solve the real-time evolution for the quantum many-body system for hundreds or thousands of spins, far beyond what would be possible in a more general case with an exponential number (2N{2}^{N}2N) of quantum states. We compare mean-field and many-body solutions for different initial product states and ratios of one- and two-body couplings, and find that in all cases in the limit of infinite spins the mean-field (product state) and many-body solutions coincide for simple observables. This agreement can be understood as a consequence of the fact that the typical initial condition represents a very local but dense distribution about a mean energy in the spectrum of the Hamiltonian. We explore quantum information measures like entanglement entropy and purity of the many-body solutions, finding intriguing relationships between the quantum information measures and the dynamical behavior of simple physical observables.
We explore the utility of qutrits and qubits for simulating the flavor dynamics of dense neutrino systems. The evolution of such systems impacts some important astrophysical processes, such as core-collapse supernovae and the nucleosynthesis of heavy nuclei. Many-body simulations require classical resources beyond current computing capabilities for physically relevant system sizes. Quantum computers are therefore a promising candidate to efficiently simulate the many-body dynamics of collective neutrino oscillations. Previous quantum simulation efforts have primarily focused on properties of the two-flavor approximation due to their direct mapping to qubits. Here, we present new quantum circuits for simulating three-flavor neutrino systems on qutrit- and qubit-based platforms, and demonstrate their feasibility by simulating systems of two, four, and eight neutrinos on IBM and Quantinuum quantum computers.
Dense neutrino gases form in extreme astrophysical sites, and the flavor content of the neutrinos likely has an important impact on the subsequent dynamical evolution of their environment. Through coherent forward scattering among neutrinos, the flavor content of the gas evolves under a time-dependent potential which can be modeled in a quantum many-body formalism as an all-to-all coupled spin-spin interaction. This two-body potential generically introduces entanglement and greatly complicates the study of these systems. In this work we study the evolution of the quantum many-body problem as well as the typically employed mean-field approximation to it for a small number of neutrinos (N=16N = 16N=16). We consider randomly chosen one- and two-body couplings in the Hamiltonian, and the resulting evolution of several initial product states. We subsequently compare many-body and mean-field predictions for one-body observables, and we consider one- and two-body entanglement to assess under what conditions the many-body and mean-field predictions are likely to disagree. Except for a special category of prototypical initial conditions, we find that the typically employed mean-field approximation is insufficient to capture the evolution of one-body operators in the systems we consider. We also observe a loss of coherence in one- and two-body trace-reduced subsystems which suggests that the evolution may be well approximated as a classical mixture of separable states.
In environments such as core-collapse supernovae, neutron star mergers, or the early universe, where the neutrino fluxes can be extremely high, neutrino-neutrino interactions are appreciable and contribute substantially to their flavor evolution. Such a system of interacting neutrinos can be regarded as a quantum many-body system, and prospects for nontrivial quantum correlations, i.e., entanglement, developing in a gas of interacting neutrinos have been investigated previously. In this work, we uncover an intriguing connection between the entropy of entanglement of individual neutrinos with the rest of the ensemble, and the occurrence of spectral splits in the energy spectra of these neutrinos, which develop as a result of collective neutrino oscillations. In particular, for various types of neutrino spectra, we demonstrate that the entanglement entropy is highest for the neutrinos whose locations in the energy spectrum are closest to the spectral split(s). This trend demonstrates that the quantum entanglement is strongest among the neutrinos that are close to these splits, a behavior that seems to persist even as the size of the many-body system is increased.
Dense-neutrino flavor evolution is a quantum many-body problem whose fully correlated treatment becomes rapidly more expensive with increasing particle number and spatial structure. We develop a \texttt{QCNO} quantum simulation code that maps a inhomogeneous forward-scattering neutrino Hamiltonian with advection and finite-range interactions to TEBD2 product-formula quantum circuits, and connects ideal many-body simulation, backend-aware execution, and fault-tolerant resource estimation within the same physical model. We reproduce the exact many-body evolution of the suppressed mean-field-like transverse fast flavor instability through N=30N=30N=30 and show that even a single open-boundary interaction generates Rënyi entanglement and non-stabilizer magic, although noisy backends still produce polarization RMSEs of order 0.10.10.1--0.30.30.3. The restricted active interaction graph of this problem allows us to estimate the circuit depth and TTT gate cost through N=50N=50N=50 for both NISQ and fault-tolerant approaches. The measured TEBD2 error in our fiducial ideal simulation of order 10−310^{-3}10−3 motivates a synthesis tolerance εsyn∼10−7\varepsilon_{\rm syn}\sim10^{-7}εsyn​∼10−7, corresponding to about 707070 TTT gates per RZR_ZRZ​ rotation. The generated circuit contains 1.4×1041.4\times10^41.4×104 TTT gates per qubit for open boundaries (twice that for closed boundaries), requiring an application-level logical-TTT error target of order 10−710^{-7}10−7 for early fault-tolerant architectures.