Quantum radio astronomy: Quantum linear solvers for redundant baseline calibration

Abstract

The computational requirements of future large scale radio telescopes are expected to scale well beyond the capabilities of conventional digital resources. Current and planned telescopes are generally limited in their scientific potential by their ability to efficiently process the vast volumes of generated data. To mitigate this problem, we investigate the viability of emerging quantum computers for radio astronomy applications. In this a paper we demonstrate the potential use of variational quantum linear solvers in Noisy Intermediate Scale Quantum (NISQ) computers and combinatorial solvers in quantum annealers for a radio astronomy calibration pipeline. While we demonstrate that these approaches can lead to satisfying results when integrated in calibration pipelines, we show that current restrictions of quantum hardware limit their applicability and performance.