Quantum Machine Learning Application to High Energy Physics to Be Studied; Researchers Receive Grant from U.S. DoE
Wisconsin Quantum Institute Awarded Grant to Advance Quantum Computing Machine Learning
In brief…
+ The US Department of Energy recently announced the funding of another set of quantum science-driven research proposals, including that of Sau Lan Wu, Enrico Fermi professor of physics and Vilas Professor at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. With the funding, Wu and her collaborators seek to tap into the power of quantum computing to analyze the wealth of data generated by high energy physics experiments.
+ The title of Wu’s DOE approved project is: “Application of Quantum Machine Learning to High Energy Physics Analysis at LHC using IBM Quantum Computer Simulators and IBM Quantum Computer Hardware”.
“Although the era of efficient quantum computing may still be years away, we have made promising progress and obtained preliminary results in applying quantum machine learning to high energy physics with IBM’s resources,” Wu says. “The US government, as well as US industrial counterparts, are planning to invest heavily in quantum computing in order to lead the international competition in the area of quantum information science technology, and we are excited to be able to apply these technologies to discoveries in high energy physics.”
+ Wu’s research program has one major goal: to discover new physics. This goal requires the identification of rare signals in immense backgrounds. Wu’s group has pioneered the use of machine learning algorithms on standard computers to move quickly and accurately to extract the physics signal. Sifting through the data to find meaningful and incredibly rare signals takes inordinate computing power at LHC.
+ “However, because of the rapidly increasing volume of data in the future HL- LHC program, our current machine learning algorithms just don’t have enough computing power to conduct complex analyses,” Wu says. “We believe that applying quantum machine learning methods may well be a new direction to go.”
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