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The Quantum Trellis: A classical algorithm for sampling the parton shower with interference effects
Sebastian Macaluso · Kyle Cranmer

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in Machine Learning and the Physical Sciences »

Simulations of high-energy particle collisions, such as those used at the Large Hadron Collider, are based on quantum field theory; however, many approximations are made in practice. For example, the simulation of the parton shower, which gives rise to objects called `jets', is based on a semi-classical approximation that neglects various interference effects. While there is a desire to incorporate interference effects, new computational techniques are needed to cope with the exponential growth in complexity associated to quantum processes. We present a classical algorithm called the quantum trellis to efficiently compute the un-normalized probability density over N-body phase space including all interference effects, and we pair this with an MCMC-based sampling strategy. This provides a potential path forward for classical computers and a strong baseline for approaches based on quantum computing.

Author Information

Sebastian Macaluso (New York University)
Kyle Cranmer (New York University & Meta AI)

Kyle Cranmer is an Associate Professor of Physics at New York University and affiliated with NYU's Center for Data Science. He is an experimental particle physicists working, primarily, on the Large Hadron Collider, based in Geneva, Switzerland. He was awarded the Presidential Early Career Award for Science and Engineering in 2007 and the National Science Foundation's Career Award in 2009. Professor Cranmer developed a framework that enables collaborative statistical modeling, which was used extensively for the discovery of the Higgs boson in July, 2012. His current interests are at the intersection of physics and machine learning and include inference in the context of intractable likelihoods, development of machine learning models imbued with physics knowledge, adversarial training for robustness to systematic uncertainty, the use of generative models in the physical sciences, and integration of reproducible workflows in the inference pipeline.

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