Quantum algorithm for the classification of supersymmetric top quark events

Abstract

The search for supersymmetric particles is one of the major goals in the next high luminosity phase of the Large Hadron Collider. Supersymmmetric top (stop) searches play a very important role in this respect, but the unprecedented collision rate that will be attained at this phase poses new challenges for the separation between any new signal and the Standard Model background. While classical multivariate techniques might be insufficient in this new environment, the massive parallelism provided by quantum computing techniques may yield an efficient solution for the problem. In this paper we make a novel application of the QAML-Z approach to classify the stop signal versus the background, and implement it in a quantum annealer machine. We show that this approach together with the pre-processing of the data with Principal Component Analysis may yield better results than conventional multivariate approaches.