Impact of Circuit Depth versus Qubit Count on Variational Quantum Classifiers for Higgs Boson Signal Detection

Abstract

High-Energy Physics (HEP) experiments, such as those at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), generate massive datasets that challenge classical computational limits. Quantum Machine Learning (QML) offers a potential advantage in processing high-dimensional data; however, finding the optimal architecture for current Noisy Intermediate-Scale Quantum (NISQ) devices remains an open challenge. This study investigates the performance of Variational Quantum Classifiers (VQC) in detecting Higgs Boson signals using the ATLAS Higgs Boson Machine Learning Challenge 2014 experiment dataset. We implemented a dimensionality reduction pipeline using Principal Component Analysis (PCA) to map 30 physical features into 4-qubit and 8-qubit latent spaces. We benchmarked three configurations: (A) a shallow 4-qubit circuit, (B) a deep 4-qubit circuit with increased entanglement layers, and (C) an expanded 8-qubit circuit. Experimental results demonstrate that increasing circuit depth significantly improves performance, yielding the highest accuracy of 56.2% (Configuration B), compared to a baseline of 51.9%. Conversely, simply scaling to 8 qubits resulted in a performance degradation to 50.6% due to optimization challenges associated with Barren Plateaus in the larger Hilbert space. These findings suggest that for near-term quantum hardware, prioritizing circuit depth and entanglement capability is more critical than increasing qubit count for effective anomaly detection in HEP data.