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arXiv:2505.10136 · Scientific Reports

Spectral quantum algorithm for passive scalar transport in shear flows

Philipp Pfeffer, Peter Brearley, Sylvain Laizet, Jörg Schumacher

Published Nov 21, 2025• 3 citations
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Abstract

The mixing of scalar substances in fluid flows by stirring and diffusion is ubiquitous in natural flows, chemical engineering, and microfluidic drug delivery. Here, we present a spectral quantum algorithm for scalar mixing by solving the advection-diffusion equation in a quantum computational fluid dynamics framework. The exact gate decompositions of the advection and diffusion operators in spectral space are derived. For all but the simplest one-dimensional flows, these operators do not commute. Therefore, we use operator splitting to construct quantum circuits capable of simulating arbitrary polynomial velocity profiles in multiple dimensions, such as the Blasius profile of a laminar boundary layer. Periodic, Neumann, and Dirichlet boundary conditions can be imposed with the appropriate quantum spectral transform. We evaluate the approach in statevector simulations of a Couette flow, plane Poiseuille flow, and a polynomial Blasius profile approximation. For an advection-diffusion problem in one dimension, we compare the time evolution of an ideal quantum simulation with those of real quantum computers with superconducting and trapped-ion qubits. The required number of two-qubit gates grows with the logarithm of the number of grid points raised to one higher power than the order of the polynomial velocity profile.

DOI
10.1038/s41598-025-27219-y

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The mixing of scalar substances in fluid flows by stirring and diffusion is ubiquitous in natural flows, chemical engineering, and microfluidic drug delivery. Here, we present a spectral quantum algorithm for scalar mixing by solving the advection-diffusion equation in a quantum computational fluid dynamics framework. The exact gate decompositions of the advection and diffusion operators in spectral space are derived. For all but the simplest one-dimensional flows, these operators do not commute. Therefore, we use operator splitting to construct quantum circuits capable of simulating arbitrary polynomial velocity profiles in multiple dimensions, such as the Blasius profile of a laminar boundary layer. Periodic, Neumann, and Dirichlet boundary conditions can be imposed with the appropriate quantum spectral transform. We evaluate the approach in statevector simulations of a Couette flow, plane Poiseuille flow, and a polynomial Blasius profile approximation. For an advection-diffusion problem in one dimension, we compare the time evolution of an ideal quantum simulation with those of real quantum computers with superconducting and trapped-ion qubits. The required number of two-qubit gates grows with the logarithm of the number of grid points raised to one higher power than the order of the polynomial velocity profile.
A quantum algorithm for solving the advection equation by embedding the discrete time-marching operator into Hamiltonian simulations is presented. One-dimensional advection can be simulated directly since the central finite-difference operator for first-order derivatives is anti-Hermitian. Here this is extended to industrially relevant multidimensional flows with realistic boundary conditions and arbitrary finite-difference stencils. A single copy of the initial quantum state is required and the circuit depth grows linearly with the required number of time steps, the sparsity of the time-marching operator, and the inverse of the allowable error. State-vector simulations of a scalar transported in a two-dimensional channel flow and lid-driven cavity configuration are presented as a proof of concept of the proposed approach. Published by the American Physical Society 2024
Two quantum algorithms are presented for the numerical solution of a linear one-dimensional advection–diffusion equation with periodic boundary conditions. Their accuracy and performance with increasing qubit number are compared point-by-point with each other. Specifically, we solve the linear partial differential equation with a Quantum Linear Systems Algorithm (QLSA) based on the Harrow–Hassidim–Lloyd method and a Variational Quantum Algorithm (VQA), for resolutions that can be encoded using up to 6 qubits, which corresponds to N=64 grid points on the unit interval. Both algorithms are hybrid in nature, i.e., they involve a combination of classical and quantum computing building blocks. The QLSA and VQA are solved as ideal statevector simulations using the in-house solver QFlowS and open-access Qiskit software, respectively. We discuss several aspects of both algorithms which are crucial for a successful performance in both cases. These are the accurate eigenvalue estimation with the quantum phase estimation for the QLSA and the choice of the algorithm of the minimization of the cost function for the VQA. The latter algorithm is also implemented in the noisy Qiskit framework including measurement noise. We reflect on the current limitations and suggest some possible routes of future research for the numerical simulation of classical fluid flows on a quantum computer.
Quantum computing offers a promising pathway to accelerate fluid dynamics simulations. In this work, we propose a hybrid quantum-classical lattice Boltzmann method (LBM) for solving the advection–diffusion equation, as a step toward an efficient and general quantum linear solver framework for fluid flows. Quantum circuits handle the computationally intensive collision and streaming steps, exploiting quantum parallelism and removing parameter constraints, while boundary corrections are managed classically to avoid unnecessary overhead. Various boundary conditions are incorporated within the quantum framework, enhancing the flexibility and applicability of the method. Numerical experiments with Gaussian hill initial conditions under periodic boundaries and zero initial conditions under mixed Dirichlet–Neumann boundaries, each in one and two dimensions, demonstrate the precision of the proposed approach. The computational complexity is analyzed in detail. The collision and streaming steps achieve a lower complexity than their classical LBM counterparts, although overall performance is still limited by the input and output costs. This work represents a critical step toward the practical quantum simulation of complex fluid flows.
The linear advection operator is an ubiquitous building block in fluid and plasma problems. We develop a quantum algorithm for enacting the operator. When the advection velocity is constant in space, our algorithm is exponentially more efficient per time step than classical and avoids spurious oscillations near steep gradients. The algorithm is most cleanly illustrated using the one-dimensional advection equation on a uniform spatial grid with periodic boundary conditions, which can be extended to higher dimensions. The algorithm uses a first-order upwind scheme, which captures discontinuities in the wave envelope but is not unitary. We embed the non-unitary upwind scheme using Linear Combinations of Unitaries (LCUs), and develop an efficient quantum gate decomposition of the upwind unitary, which performs one step of advection using O(n2)O(n^2)O(n2) two-qubit gates, where N=2nN=2^nN=2n is the number of spatial grid points, as opposed to a classical computer which costs O(N)O(N)O(N). Although LCUs introduces a small bounded probability of failure per time step, we show that the accumulation of failures does not lead to exponential-in-time complexity as one would naively expect. Moreover, when LCUs fails, we develop a probabilistic scheme to recover from the failure state, which avoids a full restart of the simulation. The failure recovery scheme uses quantum Fourier transform (QFT) and effectively achieves quantum indefinite integration of an unknown quantum state. The recovery, which can itself fail, is more efficient than a full restart if the wave envelop is well-resolved to include only low Fourier modes. We emulate our scheme classically and demonstrate small problems on Quantinuum's trapped-ion qubits. Our quantum algorithm provides a subroutine for physics simulations that involve linear advection.
We present a versatile and efficient quantum algorithm based on the Lattice Boltzmann method (LBM) approximate solution of the linear advection-diffusion equation (ADE). We emphasize that the LBM approximation modifies the diffusion term of the underlying exact ADE and leads to a modified equation (mADE). Due to its versatility in terms of operator splitting, the proposed quantum LBM algorithm for the mADE provides a building block for future quantum algorithms to solve the linearized Navier-Stokes equation on quantum computers. We split the algorithm into four operations: initialization, collision, streaming, and calculation of the macroscopic quantities. We propose general quantum building blocks for each operator, which adapt intrinsically from the general three-dimensional case to smaller dimensions and apply to arbitrary lattice-velocity sets. Based on (sub-linear) amplitude data encoding, we propose improved initialization and collision operations with reduced complexity and efficient sampling-based simulation. Quantum streaming algorithms are based on previous developments. The proposed quantum algorithm allows for the computation of successive time steps, requiring full state measurement and reinitialization after every time step. It is validated by comparison with a digital implementation and based on analytical solutions in one and two dimensions. Furthermore, we demonstrate the versatility of the quantum algorithm for two cases with non-uniform advection velocities in two and three dimensions. Various velocity sets are considered to further highlight the flexibility of the algorithm. We benchmark our optimized quantum algorithm against previous methods employed in sampling-based quantum simulators. We demonstrate sampling efficiency, with sampling accelerated convergence requiring fewer shots. • Novel LBM quantum algorithm for solving the linear advection-diffusion equation with variable velocity as a building block. • Modular quantum algorithm for 1 through 3 spatial dimensions and all common lattice-velocity sets. • Significant reduction in quantum-algorithm complexity achieved through efficient encoding strategy leveraging symmetries. • Improved collision quantum-algorithm building block leading to higher success rates for the collision operator. • Benchmarking shows faster convergence and reduced shot requirements compared to previous algorithms.