Using k-means assistant event selection strategy to study anomalous quartic gauge couplings at muon colliders

Abstract The search for new physics beyond the Standard Model is one of the central problems of current high energy physics interest. As the luminosities of current and near-future colliders continue to increase, the search for new physics has increased the requirements for processing large amounts of data. Meanwhile, quantum computing which is rapidly evolving, has great potential to become a powerful tool to help search for new physics signals. Since the k-means algorithm is known to be able to be accelerated with the help of quantum computing, we investigate and propose an event selection strategy based on k-means algorithm to search for new physics signals. Taking the case of tri-photon processes at the muon colliders as an example, the event selection strategy is shown to be effective in helping to search for the signals of dimension-8 operators contributing to anomalous quartic gauge couplings. Compared with traditional event selection strategy, the expected constraints are generally tighter.