No Arabic abstract
Quantum computers are known to provide an exponential advantage over classical computers for the solution of linear differential equations in high-dimensional spaces. Here, we present a quantum algorithm for the solution of nonlinear differential equations. The quantum algorithm provides an exponential advantage over classical algorithms for solving nonlinear differential equations. Potential applications include the Navier-Stokes equation, plasma hydrodynamics, epidemiology, and more.
While there has been extensive previous work on efficient quantum algorithms for linear differential equations, analogous progress for nonlinear differential equations has been severely limited due to the linearity of quantum mechanics. Despite this obstacle, we develop a quantum algorithm for initial value problems described by dissipative quadratic $n$-dimensional ordinary differential equations. Assuming $R < 1$, where $R$ is a parameter characterizing the ratio of the nonlinearity to the linear dissipation, this algorithm has complexity $T^2mathrm{poly}(log T, log n, log 1/epsilon)/epsilon$, where $T$ is the evolution time and $epsilon$ is the allowed error in the output quantum state. This is an exponential improvement over the best previous quantum algorithms, whose complexity is exponential in $T$. We achieve this improvement using the method of Carleman linearization, for which we give a novel convergence theorem. This method maps a system of nonlinear differential equations to an infinite-dimensional system of linear differential equations, which we discretize, truncate, and solve using the forward Euler method and the quantum linear system algorithm. We also provide a lower bound on the worst-case complexity of quantum algorithms for general quadratic differential equations, showing that the problem is intractable for $R ge sqrt{2}$. Finally, we discuss potential applications of this approach to problems arising in biology as well as in fluid and plasma dynamics.
We propose a quantum algorithm to solve systems of nonlinear differential equations. Using a quantum feature map encoding, we define functions as expectation values of parametrized quantum circuits. We use automatic differentiation to represent function derivatives in an analytical form as differentiable quantum circuits (DQCs), thus avoiding inaccurate finite difference procedures for calculating gradients. We describe a hybrid quantum-classical workflow where DQCs are trained to satisfy differential equations and specified boundary conditions. As a particular example setting, we show how this approach can implement a spectral method for solving differential equations in a high-dimensional feature space. From a technical perspective, we design a Chebyshev quantum feature map that offers a powerful basis set of fitting polynomials and possesses rich expressivity. We simulate the algorithm to solve an instance of Navier-Stokes equations, and compute density, temperature and velocity profiles for the fluid flow in a convergent-divergent nozzle.
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.
We present a quantum algorithm for systems of (possibly inhomogeneous) linear ordinary differential equations with constant coefficients. The algorithm produces a quantum state that is proportional to the solution at a desired final time. The complexity of the algorithm is polynomial in the logarithm of the inverse error, an exponential improvement over previous quantum algorithms for this problem. Our result builds upon recent advances in quantum linear systems algorithms by encoding the simulation into a sparse, well-conditioned linear system that approximates evolution according to the propagator using a Taylor series. Unlike with finite difference methods, our approach does not require additional hypotheses to ensure numerical stability.
Quantum computers can produce a quantum encoding of the solution of a system of differential equations exponentially faster than a classical algorithm can produce an explicit description. However, while high-precision quantum algorithms for linear ordinary differential equations are well established, the best previous quantum algorithms for linear partial differential equations (PDEs) have complexity $mathrm{poly}(1/epsilon)$, where $epsilon$ is the error tolerance. By developing quantum algorithms based on adaptive-order finite difference methods and spectral methods, we improve the complexity of quantum algorithms for linear PDEs to be $mathrm{poly}(d, log(1/epsilon))$, where $d$ is the spatial dimension. Our algorithms apply high-precision quantum linear system algorithms to systems whose condition numbers and approximation errors we bound. We develop a finite difference algorithm for the Poisson equation and a spectral algorithm for more general second-order elliptic equations.