The Poisson equation occurs in many areas of science and engineering. Here we focus on its numerical solution for an equation in d dimensions. In particular we present a quantum algorithm and a scalable quantum circuit design which approximates the solution of the Poisson equation on a grid with error varepsilon. We assume we are given a supersposition of function evaluations of the right hand side of the Poisson equation. The algorithm produces a quantum state encoding the solution. The number of quantum operations and the number of qubits used by the circuit is almost linear in d and polylog in varepsilon^{-1}. We present quantum circuit modules together with performance guarantees which can be also used for other problems.
Solving differential equations is one of the most promising applications of quantum computing. Recently we proposed an efficient quantum algorithm for solving one-dimensional Poisson equation avoiding the need to perform quantum arithmetic or Hamiltonian simulation. In this letter, we further develop this algorithm to make it closer to the real application on the noisy intermediate-scale quantum (NISQ) devices. To this end, we first develop a new way of performing the sine transformation, and based on it the algorithm is optimized by reducing the depth of the circuit from n2 to n. Then, we analyze the effect of common noise existing in the real quantum devices on our algorithm using the IBM Qiskit toolkit. We find that the phase damping noise has little effect on our algorithm, while the bit flip noise has the greatest impact. In addition, threshold errors of the quantum gates are obtained to make the fidelity of the circuit output being greater than 90%. The results of noise analysis will provide a good guidance for the subsequent work of error mitigation and error correction for our algorithm. The noise-analysis method developed in this work can be used for other algorithms to be executed on the NISQ devices.
Computer-aided engineering techniques are indispensable in modern engineering developments. In particular, partial differential equations are commonly used to simulate the dynamics of physical phenomena, but very large systems are often intractable within a reasonable computation time, even when using supercomputers. To overcome the inherent limit of classical computing, we present a variational quantum algorithm for solving the Poisson equation that can be implemented in noisy intermediate-scale quantum devices. The proposed method defines the total potential energy of the Poisson equation as a Hamiltonian, which is decomposed into a linear combination of Pauli operators and simple observables. The expectation value of the Hamiltonian is then minimized with respect to a parameterized quantum state. Because the number of decomposed terms is independent of the size of the problem, this method requires relatively few quantum measurements. Numerical experiments demonstrate the faster computing speed of this method compared with classical computing methods and a previous variational quantum approach. We believe that our approach brings quantum computer-aided techniques closer to future applications in engineering developments.
Recently, it is shown that quantum computers can be used for obtaining certain information about the solution of a linear system Ax=b exponentially faster than what is possible with classical computation. Here we first review some key aspects of the algorithm from the standpoint of finding its efficient quantum circuit implementation using only elementary quantum operations, which is important for determining the potential usefulness of the algorithm in practical settings. Then we present a small-scale quantum circuit that solves a 2x2 linear system. The quantum circuit uses only 4 qubits, implying a tempting possibility for experimental realization. Furthermore, the circuit is numerically simulated and its performance under different circuit parameter settings is demonstrated.
The Vlasov-Maxwell system of equations, which describes classical plasma physics, is extremely challenging to solve, even by numerical simulation on powerful computers. By linearizing and assuming a Maxwellian background distribution function, we convert the Vlasov-Maxwell system into a Hamiltonian simulation problem. Then for the limiting case of electrostatic Landau damping, we design and verify a quantum algorithm, appropriate for a future error-corrected universal quantum computer. While the classical simulation has costs that scale as $mathcal{O}(N_v t)$ for a velocity grid with $N_v$ grid points and simulation time $t$, our quantum algorithm scales as $mathcal{O}(text{polylog}(N_v) t/delta)$ where $delta$ is the measurement error, and weaker scalings have been dropped. Extensions, including electromagnetics and higher dimensions, are discussed. A quantum computer could efficiently handle a high-resolution, six-dimensional phase-space grid, but the $1/delta$ cost factor to extract an accurate result remains a difficulty. This paper provides insight into the possibility of someday achieving efficient plasma simulation on a quantum computer.
We present and experimentally realize a quantum algorithm for efficiently solving the following problem: given an $Ntimes N$ matrix $mathcal{M}$, an $N$-dimensional vector $textbf{emph{b}}$, and an initial vector $textbf{emph{x}}(0)$, obtain a target vector $textbf{emph{x}}(t)$ as a function of time $t$ according to the constraint $dtextbf{emph{x}}(t)/dt=mathcal{M}textbf{emph{x}}(t)+textbf{emph{b}}$. We show that our algorithm exhibits an exponential speedup over its classical counterpart in certain circumstances. In addition, we demonstrate our quantum algorithm for a $4times4$ linear differential equation using a 4-qubit nuclear magnetic resonance quantum information processor. Our algorithm provides a key technique for solving many important problems which rely on the solutions to linear differential equations.