Quantum Computing for Antineutrino Event Reconstruction

PROSPECT is an antineutrino detector located above ground at the High-Flux Isotope Reactor (HFIR) at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL). The energy spectrum of antineutrinos emitted from the reactors is measured by using a delayed coincidence technique through the inverse-beta-decay (IBD) interaction. The efficiency of current methods used to reconstruct antineutrino events through the signatures of the positron annihilation and neutron capture in the liquid scintillator is very low. A potential alternative to improve both reconstruction efficiency and computing time is using quantum computing. In this way, the problem of matching detector pulses consistent with the positron and neutron signals is cast to an "earth movers distance" problem. The latter can then be encoded into an Ising Hamiltonian, whose ground state can be computed in quantum annealers such as the D-Wave quantum computer processor.