Simulation of Collective Neutrino Oscillations on a Quantum Computer

by Ben Hall (MSU)

Monday 14 Feb 2022, 14:00 → 16:00 US/Eastern

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.