Towards a Quantum Computing Algorithm for Helicity Amplitudes and Parton Showers

TL;DR

This paper introduces quantum algorithms for calculating helicity amplitudes and simulating parton showers, leveraging quantum superposition to potentially outperform classical methods in high-energy particle collision predictions.

Contribution

It presents novel quantum algorithms for helicity amplitude calculations and parton shower simulation, exploiting quantum superposition and parallelism for high-energy physics applications.

Findings

Quantum algorithms compute helicities of particles simultaneously.

Wavefunction superposition encodes all shower histories.

Potential for quantum advantage in event generator simulations.

Abstract

The interpretation of measurements of high-energy particle collisions relies heavily on the performance of full event generators. By far the largest amount of time to predict the kinematics of multi-particle final states is dedicated to the calculation of the hard process and the subsequent parton shower step. With the continuous improvement of quantum devices, dedicated algorithms are needed to exploit the potential quantum computers can provide. We propose general and extendable algorithms for quantum gate computers to facilitate calculations of helicity amplitudes and the parton shower process. The helicity amplitude calculation exploits the equivalence between spinors and qubits and the unique features of a quantum computer to compute the helicities of each particle involved simultaneously, thus fully utilising the quantum nature of the computation. This advantage over classical computers is further exploited by the simultaneous computation of s and t-channel amplitudes for a 2$\rightarrow$2 process. The parton shower algorithm simulates collinear emission for a two-step, discrete parton shower. In contrast to classical implementations, the quantum algorithm constructs a wavefunction with a superposition of all shower histories for the whole parton shower process, thus removing the need to explicitly keep track of individual shower histories. Both algorithms utilise the quantum computer's ability to remain in a quantum state throughout the computation and represent a first step towards a quantum computing algorithm to describe the full collision event at the LHC.