Quantum Algorithms for Hemisphere Jets

Identifying jets formed in high-energy particle collisions requires solving optimization problems over large data sets. In this work we consider the possibility of using quantum computers to speed up jet identification algorithms. Specifically, we consider the computation of thrust, a quantity that corresponds to the most jet-like separating plane for a collection of particles. We consider how to formulate thrust as a quantum annealing problem and as a Grover search problem, and we consider realistic models of interfacing classical data with a quantum algorithm. Finally we consider the generalization of these quantum methods to other jet parameters that resemble thrust.