Quantum Simulation of Collective Neutrino Oscillations in Dense Neutrino Environment

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates the simulation of collective neutrino oscillations in dense environments using noisy quantum simulators and processors, modeling interactions and entanglement to understand flavor transformation phenomena.

Contribution

It introduces a quantum simulation approach for collective neutrino oscillations, including Hamiltonian modeling, circuit implementation, and entanglement measurement.

Findings

Successful simulation of neutrino flavor evolution on quantum hardware

Quantum circuits effectively model neutrino interactions and entanglement

Results provide insights into flavor swapping in dense neutrino gases

Abstract

Inside dense neutrino gases, such as neutron star mergers or core-collapse supernovae, collective neutrino effects cause the transformation of one neutrino flavour into another. Due to strong neutrino self-interactions in these environments, there is prevalence of flavour swapping. Considering these environments to be isotropic and homogeneous, we present a study of collective neutrino oscillations by simulating such a system on a noisy quantum simulator (Qiskit AerSimulator) and a quantum processor (ibm\_brisbane). We model the effective Hamiltonian governing neutrino interactions and by applying the Trotter-Suzuki approximation, decompose it into a tractable form suitable for quantum circuit implementation of the time-evolution propagator. Encoding the neutrino state for a system of two- and three-neutrinos onto qubits, we compute the time evolution of the inversion probability relative to the initial product state. Furthermore, we present quantum circuits to evaluate the concurrence as a measure of entanglement between the neutrinos.