Three-flavor Collective Neutrino Oscillations on D-Wave’s Advantage Quantum Annealer

In extreme environments such as core-collapse supernovae, neutron-star mergers, and the early Universe, neutrinos are dense enough that their self-interactions significantly affect, if not dominate, their flavor dynamics. In order to develop techniques for characterizing the resulting quantum entanglement, I present the results of simulations of Dirac neutrino-neutrino interactions that include all three physical neutrino flavors and were performed on D-Wave Inc.’s Advantage 5000+ qubit annealer. These results are checked against those from exact classical simulations, which are also used to compare the Dirac neutrino-neutrino interactions to neutrino-antineutrino and Majorana neutrino-neutrino interactions. The D-Wave Advantage annealer is shown to be able to reproduce time evolution with the precision of a classical machine for small numbers of neutrinos and to do so without Trotter errors. However, it suffers from poor scaling in qubit-count with the number of neutrinos. Two approaches to improving the qubit-scaling are discussed, but only one of the two shows promise.

This work was supported in part by U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Science, Office of Nuclear Physics, InQubator for Quantum Simulation (IQuS) [154] under Award Number DOE (NP) Award DE- SC0020970 via the program on Quantum Horizons: QIS Research and Innovation for Nuclear Science and by the Quantum Computing Summer School 2023 at Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL).