Explicit quantum circuits for the wave equation, built by Hamiltonian simulation, are restricted to closed domains, in which outgoing waves reflect off the edge of the computational region and return. We lift that restriction with absorbing boundaries of the convolution type - a complex-frequency-shifted perfectly matched layer realised through exponential-kernel memory variables - and make the resulting non-unitary dynamics quantum-implementable by Schrodingerisation. We obtain three results. First, explicit gate-level circuits for the absorbing evolution, obtained by extending a Bell- basis term-evolution circuit to projector-valued operator strings and Trotterising to second order; these run end to end on seventeen to twenty-one qubits and agree with exact references to within a tenth of a percent to a percent. Second, a structural obstruction: the memory form of the absorbing generator carries an irreducibly indefinite Hermitian part, whose largest eigenvalue grows as the square root of the absorption strength divided by the grid spacing and survives any diagonal rescaling of the memory fields. The known recovery threshold for Schrodingerisation then makes the post-selection cost grow exponentially in the simulated time. Third, a remedy: a Lyapunov symmetrizer, precomputed classically, renders the transformed generator dissipative and replaces that time-dependent penalty with a time-independent conditioning factor of several hundred, measured on grids of up to four thousand unknowns and saturating under mesh refinement. The crossover is early: past it the symmetrized recovery is cheaper by four to twenty-six orders of magnitude in post-selection cost, and at the longest horizons tested it is the only recovery that works.
Explicit quantum circuits for the wave equation, built by Hamiltonian simulation, are restricted to closed domains, in which outgoing waves reflect off the edge of the computational region and return. We lift that restriction with absorbing boundaries of the convolution type - a complex-frequency-shifted perfectly matched layer realised through exponential-kernel memory variables - and make the resulting non-unitary dynamics quantum-implementable by Schrodingerisation. We obtain three results. First, explicit gate-level circuits for the absorbing evolution, obtained by extending a Bell- basis term-evolution circuit to projector-valued operator strings and Trotterising to second order; these run end to end on seventeen to twenty-one qubits and agree with exact references to within a tenth of a percent to a percent. Second, a structural obstruction: the memory form of the absorbing generator carries an irreducibly indefinite Hermitian part, whose largest eigenvalue grows as the square root of the absorption strength divided by the grid spacing and survives any diagonal rescaling of the memory fields. The known recovery threshold for Schrodingerisation then makes the post-selection cost grow exponentially in the simulated time. Third, a remedy: a Lyapunov symmetrizer, precomputed classically, renders the transformed generator dissipative and replaces that time-dependent penalty with a time-independent conditioning factor of several hundred, measured on grids of up to four thousand unknowns and saturating under mesh refinement. The crossover is early: past it the symmetrized recovery is cheaper by four to twenty-six orders of magnitude in post-selection cost, and at the longest horizons tested it is the only recovery that works.
We construct explicit quantum circuits for the velocity-stress formulation of elastic wave equations in homogeneous media using Schrödingerisation. After rewriting the equations in symmetric matrix form(SMF), we use Fourier spectral discretization for source-driven periodic problems and staggered-grid finite differences for Dirichlet, Neumann, and impedance boundary conditions. The Schrödingerisation method transforms any linear PDEs into a system of Schrödinger-type PDEs -with unitary evolution- using the warped phase transformation that maps the equations in one higher dimension. For periodic problems, we develop circuits by combining controlled Fourier-mode rotations. For physical boundaries, interleaved encoding swaps the spatial and field-component registers, enabling a more efficient circuit construction using shift operators. We analyze pth-order Trotter-Suzuki formulas and derive splitting-error and CNOT-gate estimates, under the assumptions of smooth auxiliary initialization and solution-state recovery. Comparison with classical partitioned splitting methods identifies a polynomial improvement in spatial-resolution dependence for the quantum state-evolution subroutine. Noiseless circuit simulations of a forced periodic problem and an impedance problem illustrate the constructions and quantify their errors against exact solutions and classical reference computations.
Abstract. Quantum dynamics, typically expressed in the form of a time-dependent Schrödinger equation with a Hermitian Hamiltonian, is a natural application for quantum computing. However, when simulating quantum dynamics that involves the emission of electrons, it is necessary to use artificial boundary conditions (ABCs) to confine the computation within a fixed domain. The introduction of ABCs alters the Hamiltonian structure of the dynamics, and existing quantum algorithms cannot be directly applied since the evolution is no longer unitary. The current paper utilizes a recently introduced Schrödingerization method that converts non-Hermitian dynamics into a Schrödinger form for the artificial boundary problems [S. Jin, N. Liu, and Y. Yu, Quantum Simulation of Partial Differential Equations via Schrödingerisation, preprint, arXiv:2212.13969 , 2022], [S. Jin, N. Liu, and Y. Yu, Phys. Rev. A, 108 (2023), 032603]. We implement this method for three types of ABCs, including the complex absorbing potential technique, perfectly matched layer methods, and Dirichlet-to-Neumann approach. We analyze the query complexity of these algorithms and perform numerical experiments to demonstrate the validity of this approach. This helps to bridge the gap between available quantum algorithms and computational models for quantum dynamics in unbounded domains.
Abstract We propose an explicit quantum framework for numerically simulating general linear partial differential equations (PDEs), extending previous work (Guseynov et al 2025 Phys. Rev. Res. 7 033100) to incorporate (a) Robin boundary conditions—which include Neumann and Dirichlet conditions as special cases–(b) inhomogeneous terms, and (c) variable coefficients in space and time. Our approach begins with a general finite-difference discretization and applies the Schrödingerisation technique to transform the resulting system into one that admits unitary quantum evolution, enabling quantum simulation. For the Schrödinger equation corresponding to the discretized PDE, we construct an efficient block-encoding of the Hamiltonian H that scales polylogarithmically with the number of grid points N . This encoding is compatible with quantum signal processing and allows for the implementation of the evolution operator e − i H t . The explicit circuit construction in our method permits complexity to be measured in fundamental gate units–namely, CNOT gates and single-qubit rotations–bypassing the inefficiencies of oracle queries. Consequently, the overall algorithm scales polynomially with N and linearly with the spatial dimension d . Under certain input/output assumptions our method achieves a polynomial speedup in N and an exponential advantage in d for a wide class of PDEs, thereby mitigating the classical curse of dimensionality. The validity and efficiency of the proposed approach are further substantiated by numerical simulations. By explicitly defining the quantum operations and quantifying their resource requirements, our approach offers a practical alternative for numerically solving PDEs, distinct from others that rely on oracle queries and purely asymptotic scaling methods.
The Schrödingerisation method combined with the autonomozation technique in \cite{cjL23} converts general non-autonomous linear differential equations with non-unitary dynamics into systems of autonomous Schrödinger-type equations, via the so-called warped phase transformation that maps the equation into two higher dimension. Despite the success of Schrödingerisation techniques, they typically require the black box of the sparse Hamiltonian simulation, suitable for continuous-variable based analog quantum simulation. For qubit-based general quantum computing one needs to design the quantum circuits for practical implementation. This paper explicitly constructs a quantum circuit for Maxwell's equations with perfect electric conductor (PEC) boundary conditions and time-dependent source terms, based on Schrödingerization and autonomozation, with corresponding computational complexity analysis. Through initial value smoothing and high-order approximation to the delta function, the increase in qubits from the extra dimensions only requires minor rise in computational complexity, almost loglog1/ε where ε is the desired precision. Our analysis demonstrates that quantum algorithms constructed using Schrödingerisation exhibit polynomial acceleration in computational complexity compared to the classical Finite Difference Time Domain (FDTD) format.
Quantum computing promises exponential improvements in solving large systems of partial differential equations (PDE), which forms a bottleneck in high-resolution simulations of, among others, computational fluid dynamics (CFD) in aerospace applications and weather forecasting. One approach is via mapping classical PDE problems to a quantum Hamiltonian evolution, for which recently an explicit quantum circuit construction has been shown in simple cases, allowing proof-of-concept execution on quantum processors. Here we extended this method to more complex and practically relevant cases. We first demonstrate how arbitrary complex-shaped geometrical obstacles with Dirichlet, Neumann or mixed boundary conditions can be introduced in the quantum representations of elementary difference operators used to implement the PDE, either directly or using Linear Combination of Unitaries (LCU). We provide their explicit and efficient circuit constructions, and analyze the Trotter errors and asymptotic gate complexities, which in the Dirichlet case do not grow compared to the free space equation. Using these methods we then derive quantum circuits for the linearized Euler equations in the presence of a background fluid flow and obstacles, both in the conservative and non-conservative regimes. We illustrate our results by simulating the obtained quantum circuits for different boundary conditions and geometries, comparing their error to a classical finite difference scheme.
Wave equations provide a natural testbed for near-term quantum simulation of partial differential equations, but hardware demonstrations have remained limited in spatial dimension, equation class, system size, and physically meaningful output. We develop and benchmark structure-preserving, Fourier-based quantum circuits for the one- and two dimensional acoustic wave equations and Dirac dynamics with variable mass on the Quantinuum H2-2 trapped-ion processor. The experiments include one-dimensional grids with up to 1024 points and 32×32 two-dimensional grids, corresponding to an encoded state-space dimension of up to 4096. Rather than reconstructing the full fields, we estimate subdomain kinetic energies directly from measurement samples. Across all tested acoustic and Dirac dynamics problems, the H2-2 results track the classical kinetic-energy dynamics with mean absolute errors between 5.9×10−3 and 2.4×10−2. At fixed retained bandwidth, the compiled gate counts grow approximately quadratically with the number of grid qubits; the acoustic circuit sizes are essentially independent of evolution time, whereas the cost also grows with the number of product-formula steps. These results provide hardware-level evidence that accurate observable dynamics can remain resolvable for structured wave problems with thousands of encoded degrees of freedom on a present-day trapped-ion processor.