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arXiv:2510.11416

Convergence Analysis of Galerkin Approximations for the Lindblad Master Equation

Rémi Robin, Pierre Rouchon

Published Oct 13, 2025• 0 citations
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Abstract

This paper analyzes the numerical approximation of the Lindblad master equation on infinite-dimensional Hilbert spaces. We employ a classical Galerkin approach for spatial discretization and investigate the convergence of the discretized solution to the exact solution. Using \textit{a priori} estimates, we derive explicit convergence rates and demonstrate the effectiveness of our method through examples motivated by autonomous quantum error correction.

DOI
10.48550/arxiv.2510.11416

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This paper analyzes the numerical approximation of the Lindblad master equation on infinite-dimensional Hilbert spaces. We employ a classical Galerkin approach for spatial discretization and investigate the convergence of the discretized solution to the exact solution. Using \textit{a priori} estimates, we derive explicit convergence rates and demonstrate the effectiveness of our method through examples motivated by autonomous quantum error correction.
We examine the time discretization of Lindblad master equations in infinite-dimensional Hilbert spaces. Our study is motivated by the fact that, with unbounded Lindbladian, projecting the evolution onto a finite-dimensional subspace using a Galerkin approximation inherently introduces stiffness, leading to a Courant--Friedrichs--Lewy type condition for explicit integration schemes. We propose and establish the convergence of a family of explicit numerical schemes for time discretization adapted to infinite dimension. These schemes correspond to quantum channels and thus preserve the physical properties of quantum evolutions on the set of density operators: linearity, complete positivity and trace. Numerical experiments inspired by bosonic quantum codes illustrate the practical interest of this approach when approximating the solution of infinite dimensional problems by that of finite dimensional problems of increasing dimension.
Nonrelativistic quantum chemistry is based on the Schrödinger equation in continuous, unbounded space. Computational approaches on classical and quantum computers often truncate the spatial domain and introduce a finite-dimensional basis, reducing the continuum problem to a finite-dimensional one. There is therefore a fundamental question: to what extent does this approximation capture the original continuum problem? In this work, we develop a general Sobolev-Galerkin framework for estimating spatial discretization errors in quantum simulation with unbounded Hamiltonians. We apply this framework to many-body Coulomb systems and establish both periodization and Galerkin error estimates for wave-function dynamics and ground-state energies. For dynamics, the finite-basis projection error of the exact wave function does not capture the full basis-discretization error: an additional dynamical projection error enters our bound at a different rate, and we introduce an inner-product argument to control this contribution. Interestingly, the spatial convergence rates for wave-function dynamics and ground-state energies differ quantitatively. For ground-state energies, we establish a sharp M−1M^{-1}M−1 convergence rate at fixed cell size, where MMM is the number of one-particle basis functions. We also show that a uniform M−1M^{-1}M−1 convergence rate is impossible for the corresponding real-time wave-function error with general H2H^2H2 initial data. The analysis relies on many-body Sobolev estimates with explicit polynomial dependence on system size. Combining these estimates with state-of-the-art quantum algorithms, we obtain, to our knowledge, the first rigorous end-to-end complexity bounds for quantum simulation of molecular and electronic dynamics with all spatial errors explicitly controlled. The number of basis functions is determined directly from the continuum problem, without regularization.
We are interested in the simulation of open quantum systems governed by the Lindblad master equation in an infinite-dimensional Hilbert space. To simulate the solution of this equation, the standard approach involves two sequential approximations: first, we truncate the Hilbert space to derive a differential equation in a finite-dimensional subspace. Then, we use discrete time-step to obtain a numerical solution to the finite-dimensional evolution. In this paper, we establish bounds for these two approximations that can be explicitly computed to guarantee the accuracy of the numerical results. Through numerical examples, we demonstrate the efficiency of our method, empirically highlighting the tightness of the upper bound. While adaptive time-stepping is already a common practice in the time discretization of the Lindblad equation, we extend this approach by showing how to dynamically adjust the truncation of the Hilbert space. This enables fully adaptive simulations of the density matrix. For large-scale simulations, this approach can significantly reduce computational time and relieves users of the challenge of selecting an appropriate truncation. Furthermore, as a special case, our method naturally applies to Hamiltonian (unitary) dynamics.
The classical stochastic differential equation given as dX(t,ω)=a(t,X) dt+b(t,X) dQ(t),X(t0)=X0,t∈[t0,T],dX(t, \omega) = a(t, X) \, dt + b(t, X) \, dQ(t), \quad X(t_0) = X_0, \quad t \in [t_0, T],dX(t,ω)=a(t,X)dt+b(t,X)dQ(t),X(t0​)=X0​,t∈[t0​,T], where the driving process Q(t) Q(t) Q(t) is a martingale, and a a a and b b b are adapted functionals has several numerical schemes developed for it, where each exhibits distinct stability and convergence properties depending on the nature of the driving process and the functional space of the solution. A generalization of this equation is the quantum stochastic differential equation introduced by Hudson and Parthasarathy, expressed as dX(t)=E(t,X(t)) dΛπ(t)+F(t,X(t)) dAf†(t)+G(t,X(t)) dAg(t)+H(t,X(t)) dt,dX(t) = E(t, X(t)) \, d\Lambda_\pi(t) + F(t, X(t)) \, dA_f^\dagger(t) + G(t, X(t)) \, dA_g(t) + H(t, X(t)) \, dt,dX(t)=E(t,X(t))dΛπ​(t)+F(t,X(t))dAf†​(t)+G(t,X(t))dAg​(t)+H(t,X(t))dt, where E,F,G, E, F, G, E,F,G, and H H H are stochastic operator-valued functions defined on a Hilbert space. In 1992, Ekhaquere reformulated this equation in an equivalent form involving the non-classical differential equation stated as; ddt⟨η,X(t)ξ⟩=P(t,X(t))⟨η,ξ⟩,X(t0)=X0,t∈[t0,T],\frac{d}{dt} \langle \eta, X(t) \xi \rangle = P(t, X(t)) \langle \eta, \xi \rangle, \quad X(t_0) = X_0, \quad t \in [t_0, T],dtd​⟨η,X(t)ξ⟩=P(t,X(t))⟨η,ξ⟩,X(t0​)=X0​,t∈[t0​,T], which represents an ordinary differential equation of non-classical type. The stochastic process X(t) X(t) X(t) acts as a densely defined linear operator on a tensor product of two Hilbert spaces, one of which is the Boson Fock space. The vectors η \eta η and ξ \xi ξ belong to a dense subset of this tensor product Hilbert space, and the mapping (η,ξ)↦P(t,X)(η,ξ)(\eta, \xi) \mapsto P(t, X)(\eta, \xi)(η,ξ)↦P(t,X)(η,ξ) defines a sesquilinear form for each fixed pair (t,X)(t, X)(t,X). We analyze the numerical approximation of the QSDE using its equivalent inner-product form. The numerical investigation employs three principal methods: the Lagrangian Quadrature Method, the Linear Multistep Scheme, and the Newton–Cotes Method. Each method is carefully designed to ensure the consistency, stability, and convergence of the approximate solution X(t)X(t)X(t) toward the exact stochastic process. These schemes are implemented using Python programming language, which provides a flexible and efficient computational environment for testing the proposed algorithms. Our computational results show that the developed schemes generalize Taylor-type approximations of Itô processes under weak convergence criteria. The proposed algorithms exhibit numerical stability and yield results that compare favorably with analytical benchmarks. Furthermore, the implementation avoids direct approximation of the driving quantum processes, thereby preserving the natural adaptation of the schemes to quantum dynamical models.
This paper presents an efficient quantum spectral-Galerkin method for constant-coefficient second-order linear elliptic equations. The method employs a boundary-adapted Jacobi tensor-product basis that incorporates the boundary condition into the approximation space and produces Galerkin systems with polynomially bounded condition numbers and sparsity. For analytic solutions satisfying a suitable uniform regularity condition, spectral convergence allows the normalized Galerkin coefficient state to be prepared with complexity poly(d,log⁡(1/ε))\mathrm{poly}(d,\log(1/ε))poly(d,log(1/ε)), where ddd is the spatial dimension and εεε is the error tolerance, under standard sparse-access and state-preparation assumptions. At the state-preparation level, this improves the precision dependence over fixed-order finite-difference and finite-element discretizations. We further show how to estimate prescribed linear functionals of the solution, with an additional O(1/ε)O(1/ε)O(1/ε) factor arising from norm and inner-product estimation.
This work presents a numerical analysis of a Discontinuous Galerkin (DG) method for a transformed master equation modeling an open quantum system: a quantum sub-system interacting with a noisy environment. It is shown that the presented transformed master equation has a reduced computational cost in comparison to a Wigner-Fokker-Planck model of the same system for the general case of non-harmonic potentials via DG schemes. Specifics of a Discontinuous Galerkin (DG) numerical scheme adequate for the system of convection-diffusion equations obtained for our Lindblad master equation in position basis are presented. This lets us solve computationally the transformed system of interest modeling our open quantum system problem. The benchmark case of a harmonic potential is then presented, for which the numerical results are compared against the analytical steady-state solution of this problem. Two non-harmonic cases are then presented: the linear and quartic potentials are modeled via our DG framework, for which we show our numerical results.