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arXiv:2601.18767

Practical block encodings of matrix polynomials that can also be trivially controlled

Martina Nibbi, Filippo Della Chiara, Yizhi Shen, Aaron Szasz, Roel Van Beeumen

quant-phSubmitted Jan 26, 2026• Announced Jan 27, 2026• 0 citations
v1 · Jan 26, 2026v2 · Oct 6, 2026
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Abstract

Quantum circuits naturally implement unitary operations on input quantum states. However, non-unitary operations can also be implemented through block encodings, where additional ancilla qubits are introduced and later measured. While block encoding has a number of well-established theoretical applications, its practical implementation has been prohibitively expensive for current quantum hardware. In this paper, we present practical and explicit block encoding circuits implementing matrix polynomial transformations of a target matrix. With standard approaches, block-encoding a degree-$d$ matrix polynomial requires a circuit depth scaling as $d$ times the depth for block-encoding the original matrix alone. By leveraging the recently introduced Fast One-Qubit Controlled Select LCU (FOQCS-LCU) framework, we show that the additional circuit-depth overhead required for encoding matrix polynomials can be reduced to scale linearly in $d$ with no dependence on system size or the cost of block encoding the original matrix. Moreover, we demonstrate that the FOQCS-LCU circuits and their associated matrix polynomial transformations can be controlled with negligible overhead, enabling efficient applications such as Hadamard tests. Finally, we provide explicit circuits for representative spin models, together with detailed non-asymptotic gate counts and circuit depths.

Comments
23 pages, 10 figures, 3 tables

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We present an efficient quantum circuit for block encoding pairing Hamiltonian often studied in nuclear physics. Our block encoding scheme does not require mapping the creation and annihilation operators to the Pauli operators and representing the Hamiltonian as a linear combination of unitaries. Instead, we show how to encode the Hamiltonian directly using controlled swap operations. We analyze the gate complexity of the block encoding circuit and show that it scales polynomially with respect to the number of qubits required to represent a quantum state associated with the pairing Hamiltonian. We also show how the block encoding circuit can be combined with the quantum singular value transformation to construct an efficient quantum circuit for approximating the density of states of a pairing Hamiltonian. The techniques presented can be extended to encode more general second-quantized Hamiltonians.
The efficient implementation of matrix arithmetic operations underpins the speedups of many quantum algorithms. We develop a suite of methods to perform matrix arithmetics—with the result encoded in the off-diagonal blocks of a Hamiltonian—using Hamiltonian evolutions of input operators. We show how to maintain this Hamiltonian block encoding , so that matrix operations can be composed one after another, and the entire quantum computation takes ≤ 2 ancilla qubits. We achieve this for matrix multiplication, matrix addition, matrix inversion, Hermitian conjugation, fractional scaling, integer scaling, complex phase scaling, as well as singular value transformation for both odd and even polynomials. We also present an overlap estimation algorithm to extract classical properties of Hamiltonian block encoded operators, analogous to the well known Hadamard test, at no extra cost of qubit. Our Hamiltonian matrix multiplication uses the Lie group commutator product formula and its higher-order generalizations due to Childs and Wiebe. Our Hamiltonian singular value transformation employs a dominated polynomial approximation, where the approximation holds within the domain of interest, while the constructed polynomial is upper bounded by the target function over the entire unit interval. We describe a circuit for simulating a class of sum-of-squares Hamiltonians, attaining a commutator scaling in step count, while leveraging the power of matrix arithmetics to reduce the cost of each simulation step. In particular, we apply this to the doubly factorized tensor hypercontracted Hamiltonians from recent studies of quantum chemistry, obtaining further improvements for initial states with a fixed number of particles. We achieve this with 1 ancilla qubit.
In quantum computing, every operation must be unitary to ensure reversibility and preserve probability amplitudes, which is a fundamental requirement for any quantum process. However, many real-world computations in areas such as machine learning, signal processing, and dynamical modeling inherently involve non-unitary matrices. Since these cannot be directly implemented on quantum hardware, a practical workaround is required. One promising solution is block-encoding, a framework that embeds a non-unitary matrix A in C^{n x n} into a larger unitary matrix U_A in C^{2n x 2n}, enabling the simulation of non-unitary actions within quantum circuits through ancilla preparation and post-selection. This thesis presents a novel and efficient method for block-encoding based on Gram-Schmidt orthogonalization. The algorithm constructs a unitary U_A with A embedded as the top-left block and remaining components filled to ensure global unitarity. Compared to traditional Singular Value Decomposition (SVD)-based approaches, the proposed method achieves at least 20% improvement in execution time, without compromising output fidelity or numerical stability. A corresponding quantum circuit is developed to extract A|psi> (that is, the transformed version of the input quantum state |psi> after applying the linear operator A) using post-selection on ancilla qubits, with the success probability determined by
A recent interpolation-based Quantum Signal Processing (QSP) framework by Alase bypasses the phase-finding procedures required in conventional QSP, allowing for a direct encoding of the target polynomial into a quantum circuit. However, this approach assumes access to a diagonal block encoding of function values without providing an explicit circuit construction. In this work, we address this gap by developing an explicit circuit construction method for diagonal block encodings. The resulting algorithm achieves a computational cost of O(dlog⁡d)\mathcal{O}(d\log d)O(dlogd) for explicitly constructing block encodings of matrix polynomials, improving upon the best-known theoretical bounds of previous methods. Numerical results confirm this scaling, demonstrating that circuit parameters for polynomial degrees up to 10710^7107 can be computed in about a minute on a standard CPU.