The high energy physics (HEP) community has a long history of dealing with large-scale datasets. To manage such voluminous data, classical machine learning and deep learning techniques have been employed to accelerate physics discovery. Recent advances in quantum machine learning (QML) have indicated the potential of applying these techniques in HEP. However, there are only limited results in QML applications currently available. In particular, the challenge of processing sparse data, common in HEP datasets, has not been extensively studied in QML models. This research provides a hybrid quantum-classical graph convolutional network (QGCNN) for learning HEP data. The proposed framework demonstrates an advantage over classical multilayer perceptron and convolutional neural networks in the aspect of number of parameters. Moreover, in terms of testing accuracy, the QGCNN shows comparable performance to a quantum convolutional neural network on the same HEP dataset while requiring less than $50\%$ of the parameters. Based on numerical simulation results, studying the application of graph convolutional operations and other QML models may prove promising in advancing HEP research and other scientific fields.
This work presents a quantum convolutional neural network (QCNN) for the classification of high energy physics events. The proposed model is tested using a simulated dataset from the Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment. The proposed architecture demonstrates the quantum advantage of learning faster than the classical convolutional neural networks (CNNs) under a similar number of parameters. In addition to faster convergence, the QCNN achieves greater test accuracy compared to CNNs. Based on experimental results, it is a promising direction to study the application of QCNN and other quantum machine learning models in high energy physics and additional scientific fields.