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arXiv:2410.13189 · Quantum

Fast-forwarding quantum algorithms for linear dissipative differential equations

Dong Un An, Akwum Onwunta, Gengzhi Yang

Published Jan 27, 2026• 0 citations
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Abstract

We establish improved complexity estimates of quantum algorithms for linear dissipative ordinary differential equations (ODEs) and show that the time dependence can be fast-forwarded to be sub-linear. Specifically, we show that a quantum algorithm based on truncated Dyson series can prepare history states of dissipative ODEs up to time T with cost O ~ ( log ⁡ ( T ) ( log ⁡ ( 1 / ϵ ) ) 2 ) , which is an exponential speedup over the best previous result. For final state preparation at time T , we show that its complexity is O ~ ( T ( log ⁡ ( 1 / ϵ ) ) 2 ) , achieving a polynomial speedup in T . We also analyze the complexity of simpler lower-order quantum algorithms, such as the forward Euler method and the trapezoidal rule, and find that even lower-order methods can still achieve O ~ ( T ) cost with respect to time T for preparing final states of dissipative ODEs. As applications, we show that quantum algorithms can simulate dissipative non-Hermitian quantum dynamics and heat processes with fast-forwarded complexity sub-linear in time.

DOI
10.22331/q-2026-01-27-1986

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We establish improved complexity estimates of quantum algorithms for linear dissipative ordinary differential equations (ODEs) and show that the time dependence can be fast-forwarded to be sub-linear. Specifically, we show that a quantum algorithm based on truncated Dyson series can prepare history states of dissipative ODEs up to time T with cost O ~ ( log ⁡ ( T ) ( log ⁡ ( 1 / ϵ ) ) 2 ) , which is an exponential speedup over the best previous result. For final state preparation at time T , we show that its complexity is O ~ ( T ( log ⁡ ( 1 / ϵ ) ) 2 ) , achieving a polynomial speedup in T . We also analyze the complexity of simpler lower-order quantum algorithms, such as the forward Euler method and the trapezoidal rule, and find that even lower-order methods can still achieve O ~ ( T ) cost with respect to time T for preparing final states of dissipative ODEs. As applications, we show that quantum algorithms can simulate dissipative non-Hermitian quantum dynamics and heat processes with fast-forwarded complexity sub-linear in time.
We study a fast-forwarded quantum algorithm for solving weakly nonlinear dissipative ordinary differential equations. Our approach is a combination of the Carleman embedding technique and the linear combination of Hamiltonian simulation algorithm for linearized systems with fast-forwarded scaling. The complexity of our algorithm does not explicitly depend on the evolution time TTT, thus greatly improving the previous state-of-the-art O~(T)\widetilde{\mathcal{O}}(\sqrt{T})O(T​) to O(1)\mathcal{O}(1)O(1), and any remaining time dependence enters through the output norm and forcing parameters. We rigorously analyze the performance of this approach by convergence guarantees of the Carleman embedding for time-dependent coefficient matrices and detailed complexity estimates, and improve the realization of the Carleman-embedding-based algorithms by simplifying the post-selection step. In addition, we perform a numerical study on differential equations beyond the weakly nonlinear case, and identify possibility of achieving fast-forwarding scaling for systems with stronger nonlinearity or linear non-resonant effect.
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Abstract While quantum computing provides an exponential advantage in solving linear differential equations, there are relatively few quantum algorithms for solving nonlinear differential equations. In our work, based on the homotopy perturbation method, we propose a quantum algorithm for solving n -dimensional nonlinear dissipative ordinary differential equations (ODEs). Our algorithm first converts the original nonlinear ODEs into the other nonlinear ODEs which can be embedded into finite-dimensional linear ODEs. Then we solve the embedded linear ODEs with quantum linear ODEs algorithm and obtain a state ϵ -close to the normalized exact solution of the original nonlinear ODEs with success probability Ω(1). The complexity of our algorithm is O ( gηT poly(log( nT / ϵ ))), where η , g measure the decay of the solution. Our algorithm provides exponential improvement over the best classical algorithms or previous quantum algorithms in n or ϵ .
How well can quantum computers simulate classical dynamical systems? There is increasing effort in developing quantum algorithms to efficiently simulate dynamics beyond Hamiltonian simulation, but so far exact resource estimates are not known. In this work, we provide two significant contributions. First, we give the first non-asymptotic computation of the cost of encoding the solution to general linear ordinary differential equations into quantum states – either the solution at a final time, or an encoding of the whole history within a time interval. Second, we show that the stability properties of a large class of classical dynamics allow their fast-forwarding, making their quantum simulation much more time-efficient. From this point of view, quantum Hamiltonian dynamics is a boundary case that does not allow this form of stability-induced fast-forwarding. In particular, we find that the history state can always be output with complexity O(T1/2) for any stable linear system. We present a range of asymptotic improvements over state-of-the-art in various regimes. We illustrate our results with a family of dynamics including linearized collisional plasma problems, coupled, damped, forced harmonic oscillators and dissipative nonlinear problems. In this case the scaling is quadratically improved, and leads to significant reductions in the query counts after inclusion of all relevant constant prefactors.
Linear dissipative differential equation is a fundamental model for a large number of physical systems, such as quantum dynamics with non-Hermitian Hamiltonian, open quantum system dynamics, diffusion process and damped system. In this work, we propose efficient quantum algorithms for simulating linear dissipative differential equations. The key idea of our algorithms is to perform the simulation only over an effective time period when the dynamics has not significantly dissipated yet, rather than over the entire physical evolution period. We conduct detailed analysis on the complexity of our algorithms and show that, while maintaining low state preparation cost, our algorithms can completely eliminate the time dependence. This is a more than exponential improvement compared to the previous state-of-the-art quantum algorithms.
We present an efficient, nearly optimal quantum algorithm for solving linear matrix differential equations, with applications to the simulation of open quantum systems and beyond. For unitary or dissipative dynamics, the algorithm computes an entry of the solution matrix with query complexity O~(νLt/ε)\widetilde{\mathcal{O}}(ν\mathcal{L} t/ε)O(νLt/ε), where the constant ννν depends on the problem parameters, L\mathcal{L}L involves a time integral of upper bounds on the norms of evolution operators, and εεε is the error. In particular, νLν\mathcal{L}νL is linear in ttt for unitary dynamics and can be a constant for dissipative dynamics. Our result contrasts prior quantum approaches for differential equations that typically require exponential time for this problem due to the encoding in a quantum state, which can lead to exponentially small amplitudes. We demonstrate the utility of the algorithm through an end-to-end application, namely the simulation of dissipative dynamics for non-interacting fermions, which can be extended to other quantum and classical systems. We compare with classical algorithms and give evidence of polynomial quantum speedups for systems in a lattice, which become more pronounced for systems with long-range interactions and can be shown to be exponential in general. We also provide a lower bound of Ω(νLt/ε)Ω(ν\mathcal{L} t/ε)Ω(νLt/ε) for unitary or dissipative dynamics that proves our algorithm is optimal up to logarithmic factors.