Qutrit and Qubit Circuits for Three-Flavor Collective Neutrino Oscillations

TL;DR

This paper develops quantum circuits using qutrits and qubits to simulate three-flavor neutrino oscillations, enabling efficient modeling of complex astrophysical phenomena like supernovae.

Contribution

It introduces novel quantum circuits for three-flavor neutrino systems and demonstrates their implementation on existing quantum hardware.

Findings

Successfully simulated two, four, and eight neutrino systems.

Demonstrated feasibility on IBM and Quantinuum quantum computers.

Extended previous two-flavor models to three-flavor systems.

Abstract

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.