Conditioned quantum-assisted deep generative surrogate for particle-calorimeter interactions
This work addresses the computational bottleneck in particle physics simulations for experiments like ATLAS and CMS, though it appears incremental as it builds on existing generative models with quantum enhancements.
The paper tackles the high computational cost of simulating particle-calorimeter interactions at the Large Hadron Collider, proposing a conditioned quantum-assisted deep generative model that integrates a variational autoencoder with a quantum-annealer-sampled Restricted Boltzmann Machine, achieving enhanced expressiveness and demonstrating effectiveness on the CaloChallenge dataset.
Particle collisions at accelerators such as the Large Hadron Collider, recorded and analyzed by experiments such as ATLAS and CMS, enable exquisite measurements of the Standard Model and searches for new phenomena. Simulations of collision events at these detectors have played a pivotal role in shaping the design of future experiments and analyzing ongoing ones. However, the quest for accuracy in Large Hadron Collider (LHC) collisions comes at an imposing computational cost, with projections estimating the need for millions of CPU-years annually during the High Luminosity LHC (HL-LHC) run \cite{collaboration2022atlas}. Simulating a single LHC event with \textsc{Geant4} currently devours around 1000 CPU seconds, with simulations of the calorimeter subdetectors in particular imposing substantial computational demands \cite{rousseau2023experimental}. To address this challenge, we propose a conditioned quantum-assisted deep generative model. Our model integrates a conditioned variational autoencoder (VAE) on the exterior with a conditioned Restricted Boltzmann Machine (RBM) in the latent space, providing enhanced expressiveness compared to conventional VAEs. The RBM nodes and connections are meticulously engineered to enable the use of qubits and couplers on D-Wave's Pegasus-structured \textit{Advantage} quantum annealer (QA) for sampling. We introduce a novel method for conditioning the quantum-assisted RBM using \textit{flux biases}. We further propose a novel adaptive mapping to estimate the effective inverse temperature in quantum annealers. The effectiveness of our framework is illustrated using Dataset 2 of the CaloChallenge \cite{calochallenge}.