Determining the proton content with a quantum computer

Understand

We present a first attempt to design a quantum circuit for the determination of the parton content of the proton through the estimation of parton distribution functions (PDFs), in the context of high energy physics (HEP).

• The growing interest in quantum computing and the recent developments of new algorithms and quantum hardware devices motivates the study of methodologies applied to HEP.
• In this work we identify architectures of variational quantum circuits suitable for PDFs representation (qPDFs).
• We show experiments about the deployment of qPDFs on real quantum devices, taking into consideration current experimental limitations.