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arXiv:2512.17697

Digital-Analog Quantum Computing with Qudits

Alatz Alvarez-Ahedo, Mikel Garcia de Andoin, Mikel Sanz

quant-phSubmitted Dec 19, 2025• Announced Dec 22, 2025• Revised Mar 18, 2026 (v2)
v1 · Dec 19, 2025v2 · Mar 18, 2026
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Abstract

Digital-analog quantum computing with two-level systems is a computational paradigm that combines an analog Hamiltonian with single-qubit gates to achieve universality. We extend this framework to $d$-level systems by conjugating an analog Hamiltonian block with single-qudit gates drawn from the Weyl-Heisenberg basis, which provides a natural set of operations for qudit architectures. More specifically, we propose a protocol to simulate arbitrary two-body Hamiltonians with at most $O(d^4 n^2)$ analog blocks. The power of this approach is illustrated by the simulation of many-body qudit spin Hamiltonians including magnetic quadrupolar terms.

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9 pages, 4 figures, 7 supplementary material pages

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Digital-analog quantum computing with two-level systems is a computational paradigm that combines an analog Hamiltonian with single-qubit gates to achieve universality. We extend this framework to ddd-level systems by conjugating an analog Hamiltonian block with single-qudit gates drawn from the Weyl-Heisenberg basis, which provides a natural set of operations for qudit architectures. More specifically, we propose a protocol to simulate arbitrary two-body Hamiltonians with at most O(d4n2)O(d^4 n^2)O(d4n2) analog blocks. The power of this approach is illustrated by the simulation of many-body qudit spin Hamiltonians including magnetic quadrupolar terms.
Digital-analog quantum computing is a computational paradigm which employs an analog Hamiltonian resource together with single-qubit gates to reach universality. Here, we design a new scheme which employs an arbitrary two-body source Hamiltonian, extending the experimental applicability of this computational paradigm to most quantum platforms. We show that the simulation of an arbitrary two-body target Hamiltonian of nnn qubits requires O(n2)\mathcal{O}({n}^{2})O(n2) analog blocks with guaranteed positive times, providing a polynomial advantage compared to the previous scheme. Additionally, we propose a classical strategy which combines a Bayesian optimization with a gradient descent method, improving the performance by $\ensuremath{\sim}55%$ for small systems measured in the Frobenius norm.
Digital-analog is a quantum computational paradigm that employs the natural interaction Hamiltonian of a system as the entangling resource, combined with single qubit gates, to implement universal quantum operations. As in the case of its digital gate-based counterpart, designing digital-analog circuits that employ optimal quantum resources often requires an exceedingly large classical computational time. In this work we find a suboptimal solution to this exponentially large problem, showing that it can be solved within polynomial computational time. In particular, we provide an exact solution for the problem of expressing arbitrary two-body Hamiltonians as the sum of local unitary transformations of an arbitrary Ising Hamiltonian, with the total number of required terms being at most quadratic in system size. This allows us to design a digital-analog simulation protocol that avoids employing numerical optimization over a large parameter space at the preprocessing stage, minimizing computational resources and allowing for further scaling.
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Quantum simulation and computing traditionally has been based on two main paradigms, namely, digital and analog. In the digital paradigm, usually single and two-qubit gates (where qubit is an acronym for quantum bit) are employed as building blocks for scalable, universal quantum computing, although errors add up fast and error correction will be ultimately needed for scaling up. In the analog paradigm, large analog blocks are normally employed for a unitary dynamics that carries out the computation, enabling quantum operations on many qubits with reduced errors, but with the drawback of a limited choice of evolutions and lack of universality. In the past decade, a new paradigm has emerged, showing interesting possibilities for quantum simulation and computing in the near and mid term. This is the paradigm of digital-analog quantum technologies, which proposes to combine the best of both paradigms: large analog blocks, provided by native interactions of the employed quantum platform, enabling scalability, combined with digital gates, allowing for more versatility and, ultimately, universality. In this Perspective, I give an overview of the evolution of the field along the past decade, and an outlook for its future possibilities.
Digital-analog quantum computing (DAQC) is a universal computational paradigm that combines the evolution under an entangling Hamiltonian with the application of single-qubit gates. Since any unitary operation can be decomposed into a sequence of evolutions generated by two-body Hamiltonians, DAQC is inherently well-suited for realizing such operations. Suboptimal upper bounds for the total time required to perform these evolutions have been previously proposed. Here, we improve these limits by providing a tight bound for this crucial parameter, which shows a linear dependence with the number of couplings. This result enables a precise estimation of the time resources needed for quantum simulations and quantum algorithms implemented within the DAQC framework, facilitating a rigorous comparison with other approaches.
Quantum annealing processors typically control qubits in unison, attenuating quantum fluctuations uniformly until the applied system Hamiltonian is diagonal in the computational basis. This simplifies control requirements, allowing annealing QPUs to scale to much larger sizes than gate-based systems, but constraining the class of available operations. Here we expand the class by performing analog-digital quantum computing in a highly-multiplexed, superconducting quantum annealing processor. This involves evolution under a fixed many-body Hamiltonian that, in the weak-coupling regime, is well-described by an effective XY model, together with arbitrary-basis initialization and measurement via auxiliary qubits. Operationally, this is equivalent to implementing single-qubit gates at the beginning and end of an analog quantum evolution. We demonstrate this capability with several foundational applications: single-qubit and two-qubit coherent oscillations with varying initialization and measurement bases, a multi-qubit quantum walk with fermionic dispersion in line with theory, and Anderson localization in a disordered chain. These experiments open the door to a wide range of new possibilities in quantum computation and simulation, greatly expanding the applications of commercially available quantum annealing processors.