Detect anomalous quartic gauge couplings at muon colliders with quantum kernel k-means

Abstract: In recent years, with the increasing luminosities of colliders, handling the growing amount of data has become a major challenge for future New Physics~(NP) phenomenological research. To improve efficiency, machine learning algorithms have been introduced into the field of high-energy physics. As a machine learning algorithm, kernel k-means has been demonstrated to be useful for searching NP signals. It is well known that the kernel k-means algorithm can be carried out with the help of quantum computing, which suggests that quantum kernel k-means~(QKKM) is also a potential tool for NP phenomenological studies in the future. This paper investigates how to search for NP signals using the k-means anomaly detection event selection strategy with quantum kernels. Taking the $\mu^+\mu^-\to v\bar{v}\gamma\gamma$ process at a muon collider as an example, the dimension-8 operators contributing to anomalous quartic gauge couplings~(aQGCs) are studied. The expected coefficient constraints obtained using the QKKM of three different forms of quantum kernels and k-means algorithm are presented, it can be shown that QKKM can help to find the signal of aQGCs.