arXiv subjects

Michael J. Cervia

Publications and source records attributed to Michael J. Cervia.

18 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Interactions of Neutrino Wave Packets

The low energy effective field theory of interacting neutrinos derived from the Standard Model may be framed as a pointlike interaction and thereby modeled on a lattice of neutrino momenta. We identify a path to take a continuum limit of this lattice problem in the center of momentum frame. In this limit, the weak interaction is found to become trivial between incoming plane waves describing ultrarelativistic particles, unless finite neutrino wave packet sizes are taken into consideration. We follow up with an analytic treatment of interacting neutrino wave packets, demonstrating the importance of the wave packet size for characterizing neutrino-neutrino scattering in dense environments.

hep-ph↗

arXiv2026

Proton-rich production of lanthanides: the $νi$ process

The astrophysical origin of the lanthanides is an open question in nuclear astrophysics. Besides the widely studied $s$, $i$, and $r$ processes in moderately-to-strongly neutron-rich environments, an intriguing alternative site for lanthanide production could in fact be robustly $\textit{proton-rich}$ matter outflows from core-collapse supernovae under specific conditions -- in particular, high-entropy winds with enhanced neutrino luminosity and fast dynamical timescales. In this environment, excess protons present after charged particle reactions have ceased can continue to be converted to neutrons by (anti-)neutrino interactions, producing a neutron capture reaction flow up to A~200. This scenario, christened the $νi$ process in a recent paper, has previously been discussed as a possibility. Here, we examine the prospects for $νi$ process through the lens of stellar abundance patterns, bolometric lightcurves, and galactic chemical evolution models, with a particular focus on hypernovae as candidate sites. We identify specific lanthanide signatures for which the $νi$ process can provide a credible alternative to $r$/$i$ processes.

astro-ph.HE↗

arXiv2025

Magic State Distillation using Asymptotically Good Codes on Qudits

Qudits offer the potential for low-overhead magic state distillation, although previous results for asymptotically good codes have required qudit dimension $q\gg 100$ or code length $\mathcal{N}\gg 100$. These parameters far exceed experimental demonstrations of qudit platforms, and thus motivate the search for better codes. Using a novel lifting procedure, we construct the first family of good triorthogonal codes on the $\mathbb{F}_{2^{2m}}$ alphabet with $m \geq 3$ that lies above the Tsfasman-Vladut-Zink bound. These codes yield a family of asymptotically good quantum codes with transversal CCZ gates, enabling constant space overhead magic state distillation with qudit dimension as small as $q=64$. Further, we identify a promising code with parameters $[[42,14,6]]_{64}$. Finally, we show that a distilled $|{CCZ}\rangle_{2^{2m}}$ can be reduced to a $|{CCZ}\rangle_{2^n}$ state for arbitrary $n$ with a constant-depth Clifford circuit of at most 9 computational basis measurements, 12 single-qudit and 9 two-qudit Clifford gates.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2025

Collective Neutrino Oscillations in Three Flavors on Qubit and Qutrit Processors

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 AQT device for qutrits. We find that error mitigation greatly helps in obtaining a signal consistent with simulations. 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 nonphsycial qubit space, unlike the qubit setup.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2024

Fuzzy gauge theory for quantum computers

Continuous gauge theories, because of their bosonic degrees of freedom, have an infinite-dimensional local Hilbert space. Encoding these degrees of freedom on qubit-based hardware demands some sort of ``qubitization'' scheme, where one approximates the behavior of a theory while using only finitely many degrees of freedom. We propose a novel qubitization strategy for gauge theories, called ``fuzzy gauge theory,'' building on the success of the fuzzy $σ$-model in earlier work. We provide arguments that the fuzzy gauge theory lies in the same universality class as regular gauge theory, in which case its use would obviate the need of any further limit besides the usual spatial continuum limit. Furthermore, we demonstrate that these models are relatively resource-efficient for quantum simulations.

hep-lat↗

arXiv2024

Collective neutrino oscillations and heavy-element nucleosynthesis in supernovae: exploring potential effects of many-body neutrino correlations

In high-energy astrophysical processes involving compact objects, such as core-collapse supernovae or binary neutron star mergers, neutrinos play an important role in the synthesis of nuclides. Neutrinos in these environments can experience collective flavor oscillations driven by neutrino-neutrino interactions, including coherent forward scattering and incoherent (collisional) effects. Recently, there has been interest in exploring potential novel behaviors in collective oscillations of neutrinos by going beyond the one-particle effective or "mean-field" treatments. Here, we seek to explore implications of collective neutrino oscillations, in the mean-field treatment and beyond, for the nucleosynthesis yields in supernova environments with different astrophysical conditions and neutrino inputs. We find that collective oscillations can impact the operation of the $νp$-process and $r$-process nucleosynthesis in supernovae. The potential impact is particularly strong in high-entropy, proton-rich conditions, where we find that neutrino interactions can nudge an initial $νp$ process neutron rich, resulting in a unique combination of proton-rich low-mass nuclei as well as neutron-rich high-mass nuclei. We describe this neutrino-induced neutron capture process as the "$ν$i process". In addition, nontrivial quantum correlations among neutrinos, if present significantly, could lead to different nuclide yields compared to the corresponding mean-field oscillation treatments, by virtue of modifying the evolution of the relevant one-body neutrino observables.

astro-ph.HE↗

arXiv2023

Reducing circuit depth with qubitwise diagonalization

A variety of quantum algorithms employ Pauli operators as a convenient basis for studying the spectrum or evolution of Hamiltonians or measuring multi-body observables. One strategy to reduce circuit depth in such algorithms involves simultaneous diagonalization of Pauli operators generating unitary evolution operators or observables of interest. We propose an algorithm yielding quantum circuits with depths $O(n \log r)$ diagonalizing $n$-qubit operators generated by $r$ Pauli operators. Moreover, as our algorithm iteratively diagonalizes all operators on at least one qubit per step, it is well suited to maintain low circuit depth even on hardware with limited qubit connectivity. We observe that our algorithm performs favorably in producing quantum circuits diagonalizing randomly generated Hamiltonians as well as molecular Hamiltonians with short depths and low two-qubit gate counts.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2023

Quantum information and quantum simulation of neutrino physics

In extreme astrophysical environments such as core-collapse supernovae and binary neutron star mergers, neutrinos play a major role in driving various dynamical and microphysical phenomena, such as baryonic matter outflows, the synthesis of heavy elements, and the supernova explosion mechanism itself. The interactions of neutrinos with matter in these environments are flavor-specific, which makes it of paramount importance to understand the flavor evolution of neutrinos. Flavor evolution in these environments can be a highly nontrivial problem thanks to a multitude of collective effects in flavor space, arising due to neutrino-neutrino ($ν$-$ν$) interactions in regions with high neutrino densities. A neutrino ensemble undergoing flavor oscillations under the influence of significant $ν$-$ν$ interactions is somewhat analogous to a system of coupled spins with long-range interactions among themselves and with an external field ('long-range' in momentum-space in the case of neutrinos). As a result, it becomes pertinent to consider whether these interactions can give rise to significant quantum correlations among the interacting neutrinos, and whether these correlations have any consequences for the flavor evolution of the ensemble. In particular, one may seek to utilize concepts and tools from quantum information science and quantum computing to deepen our understanding of these phenomena. In this article, we attempt to summarize recent work in this field. Furthermore, we also present some new results in a three-flavor setting, considering complex initial states.

nucl-th↗

arXiv2023

Many-body collective neutrino oscillations: recent developments

Neutrino flavor transformations in core-collapse supernovae and binary neutron star mergers represent a complex and unsolved problem that is integral to our understanding of the dynamics and nucleosynthesis in these environments. The high number densities of neutrinos present in these environments can engender various collective effects in neutrino flavor transformations, driven either by neutrino-neutrino coherent scattering, or in some cases, through collisional (incoherent) interactions. An ensemble of neutrinos undergoing coherent scattering among themselves is an interacting quantum many-body system -- as such, there is a tantalising prospect of quantum entanglement developing between the neutrinos, which can leave imprints on their flavor evolution histories. Here, we seek to summarize recent progress that has been made towards understanding this phenomenon.

hep-ph↗

arXiv2022

How many quantum gates do gauge theories require?

We discuss the implementation of lattice gauge theories on digital quantum computers, focusing primarily on the number of quantum gates required to simulate their time evolution. We find that to compile quantum circuits, using available state-of-the-art methods with our own augmentations, the cost of a single time step of an elementary plaquette is beyond what is reasonably practical in the current era of quantum hardware. However, we observe that such costs are highly sensitive to the truncation scheme used to derive different Hamiltonian formulations of non-Abelian gauge theories, emphasizing the need for low-dimensional truncations of such models in the same universality class as the desired theories.

hep-lat↗

arXiv2022

Role of non-gaussian quantum fluctuations in neutrino entanglement

The flavor evolution of neutrinos in environments with large neutrino number densities is an open problem at the nexus of astrophysics and neutrino flavor physics. Among the many unanswered questions pertaining to this problem, it remains to be determined whether neutrino-neutrino coherent scattering can give rise to nontrivial quantum entanglement among neutrinos, and whether this can affect the flavor evolution in a meaningful way. To gain further insight into this question, here we study a simple system of two interacting neutrino beams, and obtain the exact phase-space explored by this system using the Husimi quasi-probability distribution. We observe that the entanglement induced by the coupling leads to strong delocalization in phase-space with largely non-Gaussian quantum fluctuations. The link between the neutrino entanglement and quantum fluctuations is illustrated using the one- and two-neutrino entropy. In addition, we propose an approximate phase-space method to describe the interacting neutrinos problem, where the exact evolution is replaced by a set of independent mean-field evolutions with a statistical sampling of the initial conditions. The phase-space approach provides a simple and accurate method to describe the gross features of the neutrino entanglement problem. Applications are shown using time-independent and time-dependent Hamiltonians in the non-adiabatic regime.

nucl-th↗

arXiv2022

Qubitization strategies for bosonic field theories

Quantum simulations of bosonic field theories require a truncation in field space to map the theory onto finite quantum registers. Ideally, the truncated theory preserves the symmetries of the original model and has a critical point in the same universality class. In this paper, we explore two different truncations that preserve the symmetries of the 1+1-dimensional $O(3)$ non-linear $σ$-model - one that truncates the Hilbert space for the unit sphere by setting an angular momentum cutoff and a fuzzy sphere truncation inspired by non-commutative geometry. We compare the spectrum of the truncated theories in a finite box with the full theory. We use open boundary conditions, a novel method that improves on the correlation lengths accessible in our calculations. We provide evidence that the angular-momentum truncation fails to reproduce the $σ$-model and that the anti-ferromagnetic fuzzy model agrees with the full theory.

hep-lat↗

arXiv2022

Collective neutrino oscillations with tensor networks using a time-dependent variational principle

If a system of flavor-oscillating neutrinos is at high enough densities that neutrino-neutrino coherent forward scatterings are non-negligible, the system becomes a time-dependent many-body problem. An important and open question is whether the flavor evolution is sufficiently described by a mean-field approach or can be strongly affected by correlations arising from two-body interactions in the neutrino Hamiltonian, as measured by nontrivial quantum entanglement. Numerical computations of the time evolution of many-body quantum systems are challenging because the size of the Hilbert space scales exponentially with the number of particles N in the system. Thus, it is important to investigate approximate but beyond-mean-field numerical treatments at larger values of N. Here we investigate the efficacy of tensor network methods to calculate the time evolution of interacting neutrinos at larger values of N than are possible with conventional methods. In particular, we introduce the use of time-dependent variational principle methods to address the long-range (in momentum space) interactions of the neutrino Hamiltonian when including many distinct vacuum oscillation frequencies. We also define new error measures based upon the instantaneously conserved charge operators known for this Hamiltonian to determine validity of large-N tensor network calculations.

hep-ph↗

arXiv2021

Spectral splits and entanglement entropy in collective neutrino oscillations

In environments such as core-collapse supernovae, neutron star mergers, or the early universe, where the neutrino fluxes can be extremely high, neutrino-neutrino interactions are appreciable and contribute substantially to their flavor evolution. Such a system of interacting neutrinos can be regarded as a quantum many-body system, and prospects for nontrivial quantum correlations, i.e., entanglement, developing in a gas of interacting neutrinos have been investigated previously. In this work, we uncover an intriguing connection between the entropy of entanglement of individual neutrinos with the rest of the ensemble, and the occurrence of spectral splits in the energy spectra of these neutrinos, which develop as a result of collective neutrino oscillations. In particular, for various types of neutrino spectra, we demonstrate that the entanglement entropy is highest for the neutrinos whose locations in the energy spectrum are closest to the spectral split(s). This trend demonstrates that the quantum entanglement is strongest among the neutrinos that are close to these splits, a behavior that seems to persist even as the size of the many-body system is increased.

hep-ph↗

arXiv2021

Lipkin model on a quantum computer

Atomic nuclei are important laboratories for exploring and testing new insights into the universe, such as experiments to directly detect dark matter or explore properties of neutrinos. The targets of interest are often heavy, complex nuclei that challenge our ability to reliably model them (as well as quantify the uncertainty of those models) with classical computers. Hence there is great interest in applying quantum computation to nuclear structure for these applications. As an early step in this direction, especially with regards to the uncertainties in the relevant quantum calculations, we develop circuits to implement variational quantum eigensolver (VQE) algorithms for the Lipkin-Meshkov-Glick model, which is often used in the nuclear physics community as a testbed for many-body methods. We present quantum circuits for VQE for two and three particles and discuss the construction of circuits for more particles. Implementing the VQE for a two-particle system on the IBM Quantum Experience, we identify initialization and two-qubit gates as the largest sources of error. We find that error mitigation procedures reduce the errors in the results significantly, but additional quantum hardware improvements are needed for quantum calculations to be sufficiently accurate to be competitive with the best current classical methods.

hep-th↗

arXiv2019

Entanglement and collective flavor oscillations in a dense neutrino gas

We investigate the importance of going beyond the mean-field approximation in the dynamics of collective neutrino oscillations. To expand our understanding of the coherent neutrino oscillation problem, we apply concepts from many-body physics and quantum information theory. Specifically, we use measures of nontrivial correlations (otherwise known as "entanglement") between the constituent neutrinos of the many-body system, such as the entanglement entropy and the Bloch vector of the reduced density matrix. The relevance of going beyond the mean field is demonstrated by comparisons between the evolution of the neutrino state in the many-body picture vs the mean-field limit, for different initial conditions.

hep-ph↗

arXiv2019

Eigenvalues and eigenstates of the many-body collective neutrino oscillation problem

We demonstrate a method to systematically obtain eigenvalues and eigenstates of a many-body Hamiltonian describing collective neutrino oscillations. The method is derived from the Richardson-Gaudin framework, which involves casting the eigenproblem as a set of coupled nonlinear "Bethe Ansatz equations", the solutions of which can then be used to parametrize the eigenvalues and eigenvectors. The specific approach outlined in this paper consists of defining auxiliary variables that are related to the Bethe-Ansatz parameters, thereby transforming the Bethe-Ansatz equations into a different set of equations that are numerically better behaved and more tractable. We show that it is possible to express not only the eigenvalues, but also the eigenstates, directly in terms of these auxiliary variables without involving the Bethe Ansatz parameters themselves. In this paper, we limit ourselves to a two-flavor, single-angle neutrino system.

nucl-th↗

arXiv2019

On symmetries of Hamiltonians describing systems with arbitrary spins

We consider systems where dynamical variables are the generators of the SU(2) group. A subset of these Hamiltonians is exactly solvable using the Bethe ansatz techniques. We show that Bethe ansatz equations are equivalent to polynomial relationships between the operator invariants, or equivalently, between eigenvalues of those invariants.

nucl-th↗