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arXiv:1611.05484 · Physical Review A

Algorithm for the solution of the Dirac equation on digital quantum computers

François Fillion‐Gourdeau, Steve G. MacLean, Raymond Laflamme

Published Apr 28, 2017• 33 citations
arXivHTMLPDF

Abstract

A quantum algorithm that solves the time-dependent Dirac equation on a digital quantum computer is developed and analyzed. The time evolution is performed by an operator-splitting decomposition technique that allows for a mapping of the Dirac operator to a quantum walk supplemented by unitary rotation steps in spinor space. Every step of the splitting method is decomposed into sets of quantum gates. It is demonstrated that the algorithm has an exponential speed-up over the implementation of the same numerical scheme on a classical computer, as long as certain conditions are satisfied. Finally, an explicit decomposition of this algorithm into elementary gates from a universal set is carried out to determine the resource requirements. It is shown that a proof-of-principle calculation may be possible with actual quantum technologies.

DOI
10.1103/physreva.95.042343

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A quantum algorithm that solves the time-dependent Dirac equation on a digital quantum computer is developed and analyzed. The time evolution is performed by an operator-splitting decomposition technique that allows for a mapping of the Dirac operator to a quantum walk supplemented by unitary rotation steps in spinor space. Every step of the splitting method is decomposed into sets of quantum gates. It is demonstrated that the algorithm has an exponential speed-up over the implementation of the same numerical scheme on a classical computer, as long as certain conditions are satisfied. Finally, an explicit decomposition of this algorithm into elementary gates from a universal set is carried out to determine the resource requirements. It is shown that a proof-of-principle calculation may be possible with actual quantum technologies.
A quantum algorithm that solves the time-dependent Dirac equation on a digital quantum computer is developed and analyzed. The time evolution is performed by an operator splitting decomposition technique that allows for a mapping of the Dirac operator to a quantum walk supplemented by unitary rotation steps in spinor space. Every step of the splitting method is decomposed into sets of quantum gates. It is demonstrated that the algorithm has an exponential speedup over the implementation of the same numerical scheme on a classical computer, as long as certain conditions are satisfied. Finally, an explicit decomposition of this algorithm into elementary gates from a universal set is carried out to determine the resource requirements. It is shown that a proof-of-principle calculation may be possible with actual quantum technologies.
In this work, we propose an operator-splitting variational quantum algorithm, termed Dirac-sVQA, for simulating the nonlinear Dirac equation (NLDE). The main difficulty arises from the state-dependent nonlinear interaction, its time-discrete update depends explicitly on the intermediate spinor state and, in general, cannot be implemented as a fixed state-independent unitary circuit. To address this difficulty, we decompose the NLDE evolution into a structured linear Dirac substep and a nonlinear variational correction. The linear substep is implemented by a spinor-Fourier Dirac propagator on a joint position-spin register, preserving the spin-momentum coupling and mass-induced spin evolution of the Dirac operator. The nonlinear correction is reformulated as a measurement-based variational update through a small set of overlap, self-channel, and cross-channel observables. We provide the corresponding quantum circuits and derive measurement-aware resource and complexity estimates. Numerical experiments in several nonlinear regimes show that Dirac-sVQA accurately captures both the total density and the componentwise spinor dynamics, agrees well with classical Fourier pseudospectral splitting solutions, and exhibits stable error behavior over time. These results provide numerical evidence for the feasibility of operator-splitting variational quantum simulation for nonlinear relativistic wave equations.
We introduce a quantum algorithm for simulating the time-dependent Dirac equation in 3+1 dimensions using discrete-time quantum walks. Thus far, promising quantum algorithms have been proposed to simulate quantum dynamics in non-relativistic regimes efficiently. However, only some studies have attempted to simulate relativistic dynamics due to its theoretical and computational difficulty. By leveraging the convergence of discrete-time quantum walks to the Dirac equation, we develop a quantum spectral method that approximates smooth solutions with exponential convergence. This mitigates errors in implementing potential functions and reduces the overall gate complexity that depends on errors. We demonstrate that our approach does not require additional operations compared to the asymptotic gate complexity of non-relativistic real-space algorithms. Our findings indicate that simulating relativistic dynamics is achievable with quantum computers and can provide insights into relativistic quantum physics and chemistry.
The last two decades have seen an enormous increase in the computational power of digital computers. This was due to the rapid technical development in manufacturing processes and controlling semiconducting structures on submicron scale. Concurrently, the electric circuits have encountered the first signs of the realm of quantum mechanics. Those effects may induce noise and thus they are typically considered harmful. However, the manipulation of the coherent quantum states might turn out be the basis of powerful computers – quantum computers. There, the computation is encoded into the unitary time evolution of a quantum mechanical state vector. Eventually, quantum mechanics could enable one, for example, to read secret electronic messages which are encrypted by the widely employed RSA cryptosystem – a task which is extremely laborious for the current digital computers. This thesis presents a theoretical study of the coherent manipulations of pure quantum states in a quantum register, that is, quantum algorithms. An implementation of a quantum algorithm involves the initialization of the input state and its manipulation with quantum gates followed by the measurements. The physical implementation of each gate requires that it is decomposed into low-level gates whose physical realizations are explicitly known. Here, the problem is examined from two directions. Firstly, the numerical optimization scheme for controlling time-evolution of a closed quantum system is discussed. This yields a method for implementing quantum gates acting on up to three quantum bits, qubits. The approach is independent of the physical realization of the quantum computer, but it is considered explicitly for a proposed inductively coupled Josephson charge qubit register. Secondly, the techniques of numerical matrix computation are utilized to find a general method for decomposing an arbitrary n-qubit gate into a sequence of elementary gates, which act on one or two qubits. The results of this thesis help to improve the implementation of quantum algorithms. The quantum circuit construction developed in the thesis is the first one to achieve the asymptotically minimal complexity in the number of elementary gates. In context of acceleration of quantum algorithms we present a gate-level study of Shor's algorithm and show how to accelerate the algorithm by merging several elementary gates into multiqubit gates. Finally, the requirements set by the resulting gate array are compared to the properties of superconducting qubits. This allows us to discuss the feasibility of the Josephson charge qubit register, for instance, as hardware for breaking the RSA cryptosystem.
Presented is a quantum computing representation of Dirac particle dynamics. The approach employs an operator splitting method that is an analytically closed-form product decomposition of the unitary evolution operator. This allows the Dirac equation to be cast as a unitary finite-difference equation in a high-energy limit. The split evolution operator (with separate kinetic and interaction terms) is useful for efficient quantum simulation. For pedagogical purposes, here we restrict the treatment to Dirac particle dynamics in 1+1 spacetime dimensions. Independent derivations of the quantum algorithm are presented and the model's validity is tested in several quantum simulations by comparing the numerical results against analytical predictions. Using the relativistic quantum algorithm in the case when mc^2 >> pc, quantum simulations of a nonrelativistic particle in an external scalar square well and parabolic potential is presented.