The quantum lattice Boltzmann scheme of Succi and Dellar advances a four-component Dirac spinor on a lattice by a fixed sequence of local, exactly norm-preserving operations: a basis rotation, a collision, a streaming shift, and the inverse rotation. While this correspondence has been noted qualitatively, it has remained unclear whether it can be realized exactly and unitarily as a gate-model quantum circuit. This unitarity is a structural property of the scheme, which should, in principle, enable an operator-by-operator port onto quantum hardware. We give a gate-level construction of every operation of the three-dimensional Dirac QLB scheme: the fixed rotation gates, the collision gate, the streaming shift as a controlled increment on a position register, the position-dependent potential as a phase oracle, and periodic and reflecting boundary conditions as unitary circuits. Together, these constructions provide the first complete demonstration that the scheme is exactly representable in the gate model without any approximation beyond the classical method itself. We then compose them into single-axis, two- and three-dimensional time steps. On a state-vector emulator the resulting circuits reproduce the classical QLB solver to machine precision, thus verifying our quantum implementation. Our aim is representability and correctness rather than computational speedup; questions of state preparation, asymptotic cost, and hardware noise are identified as open avenues for future work. Appendices restore physical units, derive the scheme's Zitterbewegung in closed form and compare it with a trapped-ion simulation, and execute a reduced two-site instance on a Rigetti superconducting processor, where choosing the qubits from the live calibration lowers the state-preparation error. All operators, circuits, and figures are reproducible from the open-source quantumKineticMethods library.
The quantum lattice Boltzmann scheme of Succi and Dellar advances a four-component Dirac spinor on a lattice by a fixed sequence of local, exactly norm-preserving operations: a basis rotation, a collision, a streaming shift, and the inverse rotation. While this correspondence has been noted qualitatively, it has remained unclear whether it can be realized exactly and unitarily as a gate-model quantum circuit. This unitarity is a structural property of the scheme, which should, in principle, enable an operator-by-operator port onto quantum hardware. We give a gate-level construction of every operation of the three-dimensional Dirac QLB scheme: the fixed rotation gates, the collision gate, the streaming shift as a controlled increment on a position register, the position-dependent potential as a phase oracle, and periodic and reflecting boundary conditions as unitary circuits. Together, these constructions provide the first complete demonstration that the scheme is exactly representable in the gate model without any approximation beyond the classical method itself. We then compose them into single-axis, two- and three-dimensional time steps. On a state-vector emulator the resulting circuits reproduce the classical QLB solver to machine precision, thus verifying our quantum implementation. Our aim is representability and correctness rather than computational speedup; questions of state preparation, asymptotic cost, and hardware noise are identified as open avenues for future work. Appendices restore physical units, derive the scheme's Zitterbewegung in closed form and compare it with a trapped-ion simulation, and execute a reduced two-site instance on a Rigetti superconducting processor, where choosing the qubits from the live calibration lowers the state-preparation error. All operators, circuits, and figures are reproducible from the open-source quantumKineticMethods library.
In the existing quantum algorithms for the lattice Boltzmann method, resolving the unitarity problem of the BGK collision operator from first principles remains a fundamental challenge, and a systematically constructed unitary alternative that reproduces the BGK relaxation structure to leading order has not yet been established in the literature. In this work, we propose a novel quantum lattice Boltzmann method (QLBM) based on the rotation collision operator, in which the non-unitary BGK relaxation is replaced by a unitary rotation in the amplitude space of the distribution function, and the corresponding gate-level quantum circuits are also constructed. Specifically, the rotation collision operator is developed for both the D2Q5 model of the convection-diffusion equation and the D2Q9 model of the incompressible Navier--Stokes equations. It is worth noting that, for the D2Q5 model, the equilibrium-state preparation circuit can be precompiled and reused, and the resulting unitary blocks can be sequentially composed once the state-dependent collision parameters are specified. Finally, some numerical experiments are performed to validate the developed QLBM, demonstrating its accuracy and effectiveness.
In this paper, we propose a complete formulation of the Lattice Boltzmann Method adapted for quantum computing. The classical collision, based on linear equilibrium distribution functions and streaming steps, are reformulated as linear algebraic operations. The inherently non-unitary collision operator is decomposed using Singular Value Decomposition and the Linear Combination of Unitaries technique. Bounce-back boundary conditions are incorporated directly into the collision matrix, while the streaming step is realized through conditional unitary shift operations on spatial registers, controlled by lattice velocity indices encoded in the distribution function register. This formulation ensures that the streaming step remains purely unitary. The resulting quantum circuit is implemented using Qiskit and validated against Couette flow and Poiseuille flow benchmarks. The simulation accurately reproduces the expected velocity profile, with relative errors below 1 0 − 4 . This work establishes a foundational framework for quantum fluid solvers and provides a pathway toward quantum computational fluid dynamics.
Abstract. We present a validated computational testbed for studying product-formula errorin a lattice gauge theory. For the lattice Schwinger model (1+1D QED, Kogut–Susskindstaggered fermions, gauge field eliminated via Gauss’s law) we construct three references —exact diagonalization, classical second-order Trotter evolution, and a gate-level Qiskit circuit— and cross-check them against each other and against published conventions. The firsttwo are independent; the second and third share the Hamiltonian construction and Paulidecomposition, so their agreement verifies the gate decomposition and circuit implementationrather than the physics, which is validated against the exact solution instead. The gate-levelcircuit reproduces the classical Trotter propagator to 7.6×10−14 after accumulated repetitions,so that the residual difference from exact evolution isolates the physical Trotter error cleanly;the Hamiltonian is verified term-by-term against Nguyen et al., and the Pauli decompositionagainst direct matrix construction, in both cases to machine precision.We then demonstrate the testbed on three questions from the existing literature. First, thecommutator-scaling bound of Childs et al. (2021), evaluated with prefactors derived numerically rather than assumed, overestimates the measured operator-norm error by a factor between1.5 and 6.8 across nine parameter points (median 2.0), rising with system size and coupling;at the reference point the ratio is 1.74, constant to three significant figures over the testedrange ∆t ∈ [1/512, 1/16]. Second, operator-norm, state, and observable errors all give fittedexponents statistically consistent with p = 2 but markedly different prefactors; we introduce anormalisation-independent gap factor G to quantify this, finding G numerically constant overthe tested ∆t range and increasing across the four accessible system sizes. We show that thisgrowth reflects the growth of the state error while the local-observable error stays constantto five significant figures — the local-versus-global robustness established by Heyl, Hauke andZoller (2019), for which we claim no priority. Third, the ordering heuristics of Tranter et al.(2019), established on 44 molecular Hamiltonians, reproduce all four of their reported trendsat the parameter point tested here — the fourth in sharpened form, the norm-based estimatorranking orderings slightly backwards (ρ = −0.292) rather than merely failing to rank them.The contribution is the validated testbed and its convention bookkeeping rather than newtheory: all three demonstrations are measurements of known results, and in the case of theobservable gap, a re-derivation of a known result in a different language. Reference [5] studiesthe same model with the same decomposition and initial state, using a first-order formula inthe long-time limit; the present work uses the second-order symmetric formula at short timeand compares against the 2021 commutator-scaling bound, which postdates that study. Codefor all reported figures and tables is provided.
Classical computational fluid dynamics (CFD) methods encounter significant computational bottlenecks in large systems and at high Reynolds number flows due to the rapid increase in degrees of freedom, even on flagship supercomputers. As quantum computers emerge, the Quantum Lattice Boltzmann Method (QLBM) has been proposed as a quantum-native alternative for solving fluid dynamics problems. However, until recently, nearly all studies have relied on classical quantum simulators rather than real quantum hardware. This study presents a benchmark of a one-dimensional QLBM implementation executed on three different IBM Quantum hardware. We design and test a quantum circuit for the advection-diffusion equation using amplitude encoding, a Bhatnagar-Gross-Krook (BGK)-type collision operator, and a streaming step with periodic boundary conditions. Our numerical experiments evaluate transpiled two-qubit gate count, total circuit depth, runtime, and accuracy metrics including maximum absolute error (L∞ norm) and root-mean-square error (RMSE). We find that the present collision and streaming operators dominate the overall cost and become the primary scalability bottleneck on current hardware. To mitigate the prohibitive cost of full quantum state tomography on hardware-based benchmarking exercises, we introduce a sampler-based measurement strategy that reconstructs macroscopic density fields directly from computational-basis measurements. This approach substantially reduces measurement overhead while preserving the expected advection-diffusion dynamics on hardware. These results provide a quantitative assessment of QLBM performance in the noisy intermediate-scale quantum (NISQ) regime and identify the principal algorithmic and experimental limitations that must be addressed for QLBM to become viable for fluid dynamics.
The Quantum Lattice Boltzmann Method (QLBM) is one of the most promising approaches for realizing the potential of quantum computing in simulating computational fluid dynamics. Many recent works mostly focus on classical simulation, and rely on full state tomography. Several key algorithmic issues like observable readout, data encoding, and impractical circuit depth remain unsolved. As a result, these are not directly realizable on any quantum hardware. We present a series of novel algorithmic advances which allow us to implement the QLBM algorithm, for the first time, on a quantum computer. Hardware results for the time evolution of a 2D Gaussian initial density distribution subject to a uniform advection-diffusion field are presented. Furthermore, 3D simulation results are presented for particular non-uniform advection fields, devised so as to avoid the problem of diminishing probability of success due to repeated post-selection operations required for multiple timesteps. We demonstrate the evolution of an initial quantum state governed by the advection-diffusion equation, accounting for the iterative nature of the explicit QLBM algorithm. A tensor network encoding scheme is used to represent the initial condition supplied to the advection-diffusion equation, significantly reducing the two-qubit gate count affording a shorter circuit depth. Further reductions are made in the collision and streaming operators. Collectively, these advances give a path to realizing more practical, 2D and 3D QLBM applications with non-trivial velocity fields on quantum hardware.
Lattice Boltzmann (LB) on quantum devices must reconcile unitary gate evolution with the dissipative \emph{collision} step. In the multiple-relaxation-time (MRT) class, we work in the common setting of \emph{modewise diagonal} moment relaxation, δmr′=λrδmr with λr∈[−1,1] (overrelaxation if λr<0). Embedding that contraction in a unitary by block encoding or a linear combination of unitaries (LCU) typically yields subunitary success probability that decays multiplicatively across modes, sites, and time, a key bottleneck for quantum LB. \emph{For the dissipative MRT block alone} we give a \emph{block-encoding-free} construction: a signed \emph{two-rail} population encoding, then a completely positive trace-preserving (CPTP) map (per-rail amplitude damping with survival ∣λr∣ and, if λr<0, a rail SWAP) so that, after the decode, the map agrees with classical MRT relaxation exactly (expectations of the rail number operators, common encoding--decode scale). Trace preservation gives success probability 1 for that substage. The main result is the dissipative MRT block; construction of the equilibrium moment vector~meq=Mfeq (prescribed~feq, host moment matrix~M; notation as in Section~\ref{subsec:generic-mrt}), moment transforms, streaming, and boundaries are composed with it as in a standard host pipeline and lie outside the scope of the formal theorem. Hybrid and fully coherent encodings, adaptive scales, Carleman-based context, and a one-rail no-go in the same nonnegative population framework are in the main text. Audits of the open-channel map on a long LBM collide-stream simulation and on stencil-free inputs both match the target to machine precision.