Hardware-aware quantum attention for fast radio burst identification

Authors:Li He, Xuan Yang, Feng Xiong, Songbo Zhang, Qiuhao Chen, Yuchen He, Yunxiang Yang, Jun Lu, Claudio Furtado, Amilcar R. Queiroz, Xinping Deng, Yang Wu, Xuefeng Wu

Abstract:Fast radio bursts (FRBs) are millisecond-duration extragalactic pulses whose discovery requires searches over large signal-parameter spaces and the rejection of candidate sets dominated by radio-frequency interference and noise. Integrating quantum processors into FRB searches requires a workflow connecting telescop data to hardware-compatible models. Here we develop a pipeline that converts raw search-mode PSRFITS data into dynamic-spectrum segments and identifies FRB-like signals using a hybrid Quantum Vision Transformer (QViT). On labelled FAST data, the selected QViT achieves a mean accuracy of 94.00% and recall of 98.30%, with similar performance to a compact classical Vision Transformer. Recall reaches 97.11% on an FRB source excluded from training and model selection. Real-device execution on 82 segments yields a mean simulator-hardware Hellinger fidelity of 0.9161 +/- 0.0074. The workflow connects raw telescope data to quantum-assisted identification and provides an experimental basis for assessing the measurement requirements that must be addressed before survey-scale deployment.

21 pages, 6 figures, 4 tables. Initial pipeline release with code and test dataset included. Feedback and community testing welcome

High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena (astro-ph.HE); Quantum Physics (quant-ph)

arXiv:2609.15108 [astro-ph.HE]

(or arXiv:2609.15108v1 [astro-ph.HE] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2609.15108 arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)