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arXiv:2511.19659

High-order splitting of non-unitary operators on quantum computers

Peter Brearley, Philipp Pfeffer

quant-phSubmitted Nov 24, 2025• Announced Nov 26, 2025• 0 citations• Revised Feb 12, 2026 (v2)
v1 · Nov 24, 2025v2 · Feb 12, 2026v3 · Feb 16, 2026v4 · Aug 18, 2026
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Abstract

Dissipation and irreversibility are central to most physical processes, yet they lead to non-unitary dynamics that are challenging to realise on quantum processors. High-order operator splitting, also known as high-order product formulas, is an attractive approach for simulating unitary dynamics, yet conventional high-order splitting schemes introduce negative time steps that are numerically unstable for dissipative dynamics. We derive quantum circuits for complex-coefficient splitting via a block encoding to overcome this problem. The unitary substeps use positive real coefficients, while the dissipative substeps use complex coefficients with positive real parts, where the real parts preserve the contractive evolution and the imaginary parts are additional unitary evolutions. We demonstrate the approach by simulating the classical problem of lossy mechanical wave propagation on a trapped-ion quantum processor. A single step of order 4 using the proposed approach achieves greater accuracy than the corresponding steps of orders 1 and 2, despite the increased circuit depth on noisy hardware. The results indicate the potential of high-order operator splitting to accurately simulate non-unitary dynamics on near-term quantum processors.

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Dissipation and irreversibility are central to most physical processes, yet they lead to non-unitary dynamics that are challenging to realise on quantum processors. High-order operator splitting, also known as high-order product formulas, is an attractive approach for simulating unitary dynamics, yet conventional high-order splitting schemes introduce negative time steps that are numerically unstable for dissipative dynamics. We derive quantum circuits for complex-coefficient splitting via a block encoding to overcome this problem. The unitary substeps use positive real coefficients, while the dissipative substeps use complex coefficients with positive real parts, where the real parts preserve the contractive evolution and the imaginary parts are additional unitary evolutions. We demonstrate the approach by simulating the classical problem of lossy mechanical wave propagation on a trapped-ion quantum processor. A single step of order 4 using the proposed approach achieves greater accuracy than the corresponding steps of orders 1 and 2, despite the increased circuit depth on noisy hardware. The results indicate the potential of high-order operator splitting to accurately simulate non-unitary dynamics on near-term quantum processors.
We propose a high order numerical decomposition of exponentials of hermitean operators in terms of a product of exponentials of simple terms, following an idea which has been pioneered by M. Suzuki, however implementing it for complex coefficients. We outline a convenient fourth order formula which can be written compactly for arbitrary number of noncommuting terms in the Hamiltonian and which is superiour to the optimal formula with real coefficients, both in complexity and accuracy. We show asymptotic stability of our method for sufficiently small time step and demonstrate its efficiency and accuracy in different numerical models.
We propose a high order numerical decomposition of exponentials of Hermitian operators in terms of a product of exponentials of simple terms, following an idea which has been pioneered by M Suzuki, implementing it for complex coefficients. We outline a convenient fourth-order formula which can be written compactly for an arbitrary number of non-commuting terms in the Hamiltonian and which is superior to the optimal formula with real coefficients, both in complexity and accuracy. We show asymptotic stability of our method for a sufficiently small time step and demonstrate its efficiency and accuracy in different numerical models.
In this work we propose an approach for implementing time-evolution of a quantum system using product formulas. The quantum algorithms we develop have provably better scaling (in terms of gate complexity and circuit depth) than a naive application of well-known Trotter formulas, for systems where the evolution is determined by a Hamiltonian with different energy scales (i.e., one part is "large" and another part is "small"). Our algorithms generate a decomposition of the evolution operator into a product of simple unitaries that are directly implementable on a quantum computer. Although the theoretical scaling is suboptimal compared with state-of-the-art algorithms (e.g., quantum signal processing), the performance of the algorithms we propose is highly competitive in practice. We illustrate this via extensive numerical simulations for several models. For instance, in the strong-field regime of the 1D transverse-field Ising model, our algorithms achieve an improvement of one order of magnitude in both the system size and evolution time that can be simulated with a fixed budget of 1000 arbitrary 2-qubit gates, compared with standard Trotter formulas.
The split-operator algorithm combined with the dynamic Fourier method is a popular approach for quantum dynamics in systems with separable kinetic and potential energies because it is explicit, easy to implement, and preserves many geometric invariants of the exact evolution. Although the standard version has only second-order accuracy, it can be recursively symmetrically composed to obtain geometric integrators of arbitrary even order of accuracy in the time step. We have implemented such integrators for nonadiabatic quantum dynamics in the diabatic basis using the triple-jump, Suzuki-fractal, and several non-recursive optimal compositions of the second-order split-operator algorithm. Because the automatically generated splitting coefficients are redundant, we reduce the computational cost by pruning these coefficients and lower memory requirements by identifying unique coefficients. The composed integrators are exactly unitary, symplectic, symmetric, time-reversible, and stable regardless of the accuracy of the solution. The order of convergence and preservation of geometric properties are justified analytically and confirmed numerically on a two-surface NaI model in the diabatic representation. Efficiency of higher-order algorithms is sometimes questioned because the number of splitting steps grows exponentially with the order. Yet, we show that, if higher accuracy is desired, higher-order integrators become the most efficient; a 600-fold speedup compared to the second-order split-operator method and a 17000-fold speedup compared to the trapezoidal rule (the Crank-Nicolson method) was observed for convergence error of 10−10^{-10}−10.
We adapt a recent advance in resource-frugal quantum signal processing - the Quantum Eigenvalue Transform with Unitary matrices (QET-U) - to explore non-unitary imaginary time evolution on early fault-tolerant quantum computers using exactly emulated quantum circuits. We test strategies for optimising the circuit depth and the probability of successfully preparing the desired imaginary-time evolved states. For the task of ground state preparation, we confirm that the probability of successful post-selection is quadratic in the initial reference state overlap γγγ as O(γ2)O(γ^2)O(γ2). When applied instead to thermal state preparation, we show QET-U can directly estimate partition functions at exponential cost. Finally, we combine QET-U with Trotter product formula to perform non-normal Hamiltonian simulation in the propagation of Lindbladian open quantum system dynamics. We find that QET-U for non-unitary dynamics is flexible, intuitive and straightforward to use, and suggest ways for delivering quantum advantage in simulation tasks.
We propose an efficient block-encoding technique for the implementation of the Linear Combination of Hamiltonian Simulations (LCHS) for simulating dissipative initial-value problems. This algorithm approximates a target nonunitary operator as a weighted sum of Hamiltonian evolutions, thereby emulating a dissipative problem by mixing various time scales. We introduce an efficient encoding of the LCHS into a quantum circuit based on a simple coordinate transformation that turns the dependence on the summation index into a trigonometric function. Classically, this method is equivalent to the use of a highly accurate Fejér-Clenshaw-Curtis quadrature formula. Quantumly, this significantly simplifies block-encoding of a dissipative problem and allows one to perform an exponential number of Hamiltonian simulations by a single Quantum Signal Processing (QSP) circuit. The resulting LCHS circuit has high success probability and the selector scales logarithmically with the number of terms in the LCHS sum and linearly with time. Careful analysis of error convergence proves that this method is more efficient than other LCHS circuits that have recently appeared in the literature. We verify the quantum circuit and its scaling by simulating it on a digital emulator of fault-tolerant quantum computers and, as a test problem, solve the advection-diffusion equation. The proposed algorithm can be used for modeling a wide class of nonunitary initial-value problems including the Liouville equation with added dissipation and linear embeddings of nonlinear systems, such as the Koopman-von Neumann and Carleman embeddings.