Scalable Qubit Representations of Neutrino Mixing Matrices

TL;DR

This paper develops quantum algorithms to efficiently encode and simulate neutrino mixing and oscillations on quantum computers, enabling complex multi-neutrino phenomena to be studied beyond classical computational limits.

Contribution

It introduces novel quantum encoding algorithms for neutrino states, allowing simulation of any number of flavor-mixed neutrinos with or without CP-violation.

Findings

Algorithms successfully encode neutrino oscillations on IBM-Q.

Simulations converge to analytical predictions.

Efficient encoding reduces computational complexity.

Abstract

Oscillating neutrino beams exhibit quantum coherence over distances of thousands of kilometers. Their unambiguously quantum nature suggests an appealing test system for direct quantum simulation. Such techniques may enable presently analytically intractable calculations involving multi-neutrino entanglements, such as collective neutrino oscillations in supernovae, but only once oscillation phenomenology is properly re-expressed in the language of quantum circuits. Here we resolve outstanding conceptual issues regarding encoding of arbitrarily mixed neutrino flavor states in the Hilbert space of an n-qubit quantum computer. We introduce algorithms to encode mixing and oscillation of any number of flavor-mixed neutrinos, both with and without CP-violation, with an efficient number of prescriptive input parameters in terms of sub-rotations of the PMNS matrix in standard form. Examples encoded for an IBM-Q quantum computer are shown to converge to analytic predictions both with and without CP-violation.