13–16 Jul 2026
Queen Mary University of London, Mile End Campus
Europe/London timezone

Scattering Amplitudes on a Quantum Annealer

15 Jul 2026, 17:10
20m
Maths Lecture Theatre

Maths Lecture Theatre

Contributed Talk Contributed talk

Speaker

Graham Van Goffrier (University of Southampton)

Description

Perturbative quantum field theory typically expresses scattering amplitudes as sums over exponentially many Feynman diagrams. Here we introduce a binary-optimization approach to all-loop scattering amplitudes, based on recent “surfaceology” representations in which Feynman diagrams correspond to triangulations of marked surfaces. We show how to define degenerate QUBO problems whose solutions correspond to the locus of valid diagrams at a given loop order, and which are amenable to solution on modern quantum annealers. We also clarify the symmetry reductions, preprocessing, and postprocessing strategies needed to realise sufficient coverage and sampling uniformity, and demonstrate performance on a variety of solvers (including d-wave). We will comment on natural extensions of this work from our phi^3 test case to quantum field theories with colored degrees of freedom and higher-order interactions.

Authors

Graham Van Goffrier (University of Southampton) Sergii Strelchuk (University of Oxford)

Presentation materials