Simulation of Collective Neutrino Oscillations on a Quantum Computer

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates the first simulation of collective neutrino oscillations on a quantum computer, highlighting the importance of error mitigation for extracting meaningful entanglement data.

Contribution

It introduces a strategy to simulate neutrino interactions on current quantum devices and tracks entanglement evolution in real-time.

Findings

Error mitigation is crucial for meaningful results on noisy quantum devices.

Quantum simulation can provide insights into neutrino collective oscillations.

Real-time entanglement tracking is feasible with current quantum hardware.

Abstract

In astrophysical scenarios with large neutrino density, like supernovae and the early universe, the presence of neutrino-neutrino interactions can give rise to collective flavor oscillations in the out-of-equilibrium collective dynamics of a neutrino cloud. The role of quantum correlations in these phenomena is not yet well understood, in large part due to complications in solving for the real-time evolution of the strongly coupled many-body system. Future fault-tolerant quantum computers hold the promise to overcome much of these limitations and provide direct access to the correlated neutrino dynamic. In this work, we present the first simulation of a small system of interacting neutrinos using current generation quantum devices. We introduce a strategy to overcome limitations in the natural connectivity of the qubits and use it to track the evolution of entanglement in real-time. The results show the critical importance of error-mitigation techniques to extract meaningful results for entanglement measures using noisy, near term, quantum devices.