Collective neutrino oscillations in three flavors on qubit and qutrit processors

Journal Article · Fri May 30 00:00:00 EDT 2025 · Physical Review. D.

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/gjr1-lf8s· OSTI ID:3003445

Spagnoli, Luca ^[1]; Goss, Noah ^[2]; Roggero, Alessandro ^[1]; Rrapaj, Ermal ^[3]; Cervia, Michael J. ^[4]; Patwardhan, Amol V. ^[5]; Naik, Ravi K. ^[2]; Balantekin, A. Baha ^[6]; Younis, Ed ^[7]; Santiago, David I. ^[2]; Siddiqi, Irfan ^[2]; Aldaihan, Sheakha ^[8]

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1. Univ. of Trento (Italy); Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare, Trento (Italy). Trento Institute for Fundamental Physics and Applications (INFN-TIFPA)
2. University of California, Berkeley, CA (United States); Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL), Berkeley, CA (United States)
3. Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL), Berkeley, CA (United States); University of California, Berkeley, CA (United States); RIKEN, Saitama (Japan)
4. Univ. of Washington, Seattle, WA (United States)
5. Univ. of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN (United States); New York Inst. of Technology, NY (United States)
6. Univ. of Wisconsin, Madison, WI (United States)
7. Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL), Berkeley, CA (United States)
8. King Saud Univ., Riyadh (Saudi Arabia)

Collective neutrino flavor oscillations are of primary importance in understanding the dynamic evolution of core-collapse supernovae and subsequent terrestrial detection, but also among the most challenging aspects of numerical simulations. This situation is complicated by the quantum many-body nature of the problem due to neutrino-neutrino interactions, which demands a quantum treatment. An additional complication is the presence of three flavors, which often is approximated by the electron flavor and a heavy lepton flavor. In this work, we provide both qubit and qutrit encodings for all three flavors, and develop optimized quantum circuits for the time evolution and analyze the Trotter error. We conclude our study with a hardware experiment of a system of two neutrinos with superconducting hardware: the IBM Torino device for qubits and Advanced Quantum Testbed device at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory for qutrits. We find that error mitigation greatly helps in obtaining a signal consistent with simulations. Finally, while hardware results are comparable at this stage, we expect the qutrit setup to be more convenient for large-scale simulations since it does not suffer from probability leakage into nonphysical qubit space, unlike the qubit setup.

• Research Organization: Univ. of Washington, Seattle, WA (United States); University of Wisconsin, Madison, WI (United States)
• Sponsoring Organization: U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF); USDOE Office of Science (SC), Advanced Scientific Computing Research (ASCR); USDOE Office of Science (SC), Basic Energy Sciences (BES). Scientific User Facilities (SUF); USDOE Office of Science (SC), High Energy Physics (HEP); USDOE Office of Science (SC), Nuclear Physics (NP)
• Grant/Contract Number: AC02-05CH11231; AC05-00OR22725; FG02-87ER40328; FG02-97ER41014; SC0019465; SC0021143
• OSTI ID: 3003445
• Alternate ID(s): OSTI ID: 2568548
• Journal Information: Physical Review. D., Journal Name: Physical Review. D. Journal Issue: 10 Vol. 111; ISSN 2470-0010; ISSN 2470-0029
• Publisher: American Physical Society (APS)
• Country of Publication: United States
• Language: English

Related Subjects

Neutrino oscillations
Quantum algorithms
Quantum simulation
Qudits
Superconducting qubits
neutrino oscillations
quantum algorithms
quantum simulation
qudits
superconducting qubits