The machine learning work by Gr@v member Felipe Freitas for detecting gravitational waves was awarded a prize of US $4000 in QHack 2021, being ranked in the top 20 amongst over 300 submitted projects.
Detecting gravitational waves is not an easy task. It took LIGO (Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory), a team of 900 scientists from around 40 institutions working roughly 14 years from its operation start to the announcement, in 2016, of the first gravitational wave observation, from a binary black hole (BBH) merger.
In recent years the use of Deep Learning and computer vision techniques has greatly increased the power of detecting and of parameter estimation of such events.
Felipe Freitas' project is based on the idea of using Image-GPT in addition with variational quantum circuits (VQC) and Quantum transfer learning to boost the searches for BBH merges and neutron stars collisions.