Qutrits for physics at the LHC
The identification of anomalous events that are not explained by the Standard Model of particle physics, and the possible discovery of exotic physical phenomena, pose significant theoretical, experimental and computational challenges. The task will intensify at the High-Luminosity Large Hadron Collider and next-generation colliders, such as the proposed Future Circular Collider. Consequently, considerable challenges are expected concerning data processing, signal reconstruction, and analysis. This work explores the previously unstudied application of qutrit-based Quantum Machine Learning models for anomaly detection in high-energy physics data, with a focus on LHC scenarios. Motivated by the potential of higher-dimensional quantum systems (qudits) to enhance state space capacity and expressive power, we benchmark a qutrit-based quantum autoencoder against a standard qubit baseline to evaluate its feasibility and resource requirements. Our results show that the qutrit-based model achieves competitive anomaly detection performance and higher expressive power in terms of anomaly discrimination capacity, while requiring fewer physical units, thereby demonstrating the practical viability of Majorana-encoded ternary representations for high-energy physics data compression within current and near-future quantum frameworks.