A pattern recognition algorithm for quantum annealers

22 Feb 2019  ·  Frederic Bapst, Wahid Bhimji, Paolo Calafiura, Heather Gray, Wim Lavrijsen, Lucy Linder ·

The reconstruction of charged particles will be a key computing challenge for the high-luminosity Large Hadron Collider (HL-LHC) where increased data rates lead to large increases in running time for current pattern recognition algorithms. An alternative approach explored here expresses pattern recognition as a Quadratic Unconstrained Binary Optimization (QUBO) using software and quantum annealing. At track densities comparable with current LHC conditions, our approach achieves physics performance competitive with state-of-the-art pattern recognition algorithms. More research will be needed to achieve comparable performance in HL-LHC conditions, as increasing track density decreases the purity of the QUBO track segment classifier.

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