https://doi.org/10.1140/epja/s10050-023-01092-7
Review
Quantum information and quantum simulation of neutrino physics
1
University of Wisconsin, 1150 University Ave, 53706, Madison, WI, USA
2
George Washington University, 725 21st St NW, 20052, Washington, DC, USA
3
University of Maryland, 20742, College Park, MD, USA
4
SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, 2575 Sand Hill Rd, 94025, Menlo Park, CA, USA
5
ERSC, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, 94720, Berkeley, CA, USA
6
RIKEN iTHEMS, 351-0198, Wako, Saitama, Japan
7
University of California, 94720-7300, Berkeley, CA, USA
Received:
1
May
2023
Accepted:
13
July
2023
Published online:
17
August
2023
In extreme astrophysical environments such as core-collapse supernovae and binary neutron star mergers, neutrinos play a major role in driving various dynamical and microphysical phenomena, such as baryonic matter outflows, the synthesis of heavy elements, and the supernova explosion mechanism itself. The interactions of neutrinos with matter in these environments are flavor-specific, which makes it of paramount importance to understand the flavor evolution of neutrinos. Flavor evolution in these environments can be a highly nontrivial problem thanks to a multitude of collective effects in flavor space, arising due to neutrino-neutrino (
-) interactions in regions with high neutrino densities. A neutrino ensemble undergoing flavor oscillations under the influence of significant - interactions is somewhat analogous to a system of coupled spins with long-range interactions among themselves and with an external field (‘ long-range’ in momentum-space in the case of neutrinos). As a result, it becomes pertinent to consider whether these interactions can give rise to significant quantum correlations among the interacting neutrinos, and whether these correlations have any consequences for the flavor evolution of the ensemble. In particular, one may seek to utilize concepts and tools from quantum information science and quantum computing to deepen our understanding of these phenomena. In this article, we attempt to summarize recent work in this field. Furthermore, we also present some new results in a three-flavor setting, considering complex initial states.
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© The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Società Italiana di Fisica and Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature 2023. Springer Nature or its licensor (e.g. a society or other partner) holds exclusive rights to this article under a publishing agreement with the author(s) or other rightsholder(s); author self-archiving of the accepted manuscript version of this article is solely governed by the terms of such publishing agreement and applicable law.
