Entanglement in collective neutrino oscillations: quantum simulations and tensor networks

  • Sept. 2, 2021, 2:30 pm US/Central
  • Alessandro Roggero, University of Trento
  • slides
  • video

In extreme astrophysical phenomena like supernova explosions, the large neutrino density can lead to collective flavor oscillations driven by neutrino-neutrino interactions. These phenomena can greatly modify flavor transport in these environments with potentially important consequences for both the explosion mechanism and nucleosynthesis in the ejected material. Even simple models of neutrino-neutrino interactions lead to a challenging many-body problem that traditionally has been addressed using approximations that neglect the role of quantum entanglement. In this talk I will discuss recent efforts to understand the impact of quantum correlations in these models using both simulations on current quantum hardware and classical tensor network methods based on Matrix Product States. We will see in particular that the latter methods provide an ideal tool to identify interesting regimes displaying large entanglement allowing to focus the increasingly available quantum resources on classically challenging configurations.