Neutrino Physics and Quantum Information

Neutrinos govern the behavior of high-density astrophysical systems such as core-collapse supernovae and binary neutron star mergers. The description of neutrino self-interactions is key to understanding the flavor composition of neutrinos from supernovae that could be observed by DUNE, and to predicting the abundance of elements produced during nucleosynthesis in these systems. The associated many-body problem is difficult to address using classical methods, owing to the exponentially large Hilbert space of the system. The project develops the quantum computing framework for the neutrino many body problem: computing the scaling behavior with time for classical versus quantum simulation for relevant many-body problems; matching simplified many-body problems onto effective finite dimensional Hilbert spaces to enable quantum simulation; and mapping the effective Hamiltonians to quantum computer operations.