The Harrow/Hassidim/Lloyd algorithm is a celebrated quantum matrix equation solver. Its Hamiltonian simulation involves a quantum walk process. A newly developed Quantum Walk Unitary HHL (QWU-HHL) leverages the spectral relationship between the quantum walk operator and the system matrix, and uses the quantum walk operator as its unitary in the phase estimation directly, allowing Hamiltonian simulation in the classical HHL to be removed, hence improving its efficiency. Despite the potential of being exponentially faster than classical matrix equation solvers, HHL is not feasible in the noisy intermediate-scale quantum era because its quantum circuit is too deep to preserve an accurate solution. In this work, we investigate the error behavior of QWU-HHL on a 7-qubit quantum system. Instead of executing the entire circuit, the behaviors of its sub-circuits which each contain only an initialization and a single gate are recorded. The error caused by isolated initialization and operation are analyzed.
The Harrow/Hassidim/Lloyd algorithm is a celebrated quantum matrix equation solver. Its Hamiltonian simulation involves a quantum walk process. A newly developed Quantum Walk Unitary HHL (QWU-HHL) leverages the spectral relationship between the quantum walk operator and the system matrix, and uses the quantum walk operator as its unitary in the phase estimation directly, allowing Hamiltonian simulation in the classical HHL to be removed, hence improving its efficiency. Despite the potential of being exponentially faster than classical matrix equation solvers, HHL is not feasible in the noisy intermediate-scale quantum era because its quantum circuit is too deep to preserve an accurate solution. In this work, we investigate the error behavior of QWU-HHL on a 7-qubit quantum system. Instead of executing the entire circuit, the behaviors of its sub-circuits which each contain only an initialization and a single gate are recorded. The error caused by isolated initialization and operation are analyzed.
Quantum computation offers a promising alternative to classical computing methods in many areas of numerical science, with algorithms that make use of the unique ways in which quantum computers store and manipulate data often achieving dramatic improvements in performance over their classical counterparts. The potential efficiency of quantum computers is particularly important for numerical simulations, where the capabilities of classical computing systems are often insufficient for the analysis of real-world problems. In this work, we study problems involving the solution of matrix equations, for which there is limited research on efficient, general, and fully implemented quantum procedures. We develop a generalization of the Harrow/Hassidim/Lloyd algorithm by providing an alternative unitary for eigenphase estimation. This unitary, which we have adopted from research in the area of quantum walks, has the advantage of being well defined for any arbitrary matrix equation, thereby allowing the solution procedure to be directly implemented on quantum hardware for any well-conditioned system. The procedure is most useful for sparse matrix equations, as it allows for the inverse of a matrix to be applied with O(sN log(N)) complexity, where N is the number of unknowns, and s is an upper bound on the number of nonzero elements in any row of the system matrix. This efficiency is competitive with the most sophisticated available classical solvers, and is independent of the structure of the input matrix. Hence, this procedure represents an important step towards the achievement of quantum advantage over classical algorithms for practical problems in numerical science.
We propose a hybrid quantum-classical implementation of the Harrow-Hassidim-Lloyd (HHL) algorithm for the matrix inversion (linear-systems) problem, a key subroutine in quantum computing. Rather than claiming a new complexity result, we provide an assumption-explicit proof sketch, aligned with established literature, that contextualizes matrix inversion as Bounded-Error Quantum Polynomial Time (BQP)-complete and offers reduction-based intuition via Grover-type amplitude amplification. We implement HHL for 2 × 2, 4 × 4, and 8 × 8 Hermitian matrices using Qiskit and evaluate performance using simulator-based experiments with calibrated noise models and executions on IBM Quantum and IonQ backends. To enhance robustness on Noisy Intermediate-Scale Quantum (NISQ) hardware, we integrate measurement-error mitigation, zero-noise extrapolation, and post-selection, and we quantify performance using fidelity and mean squared error. Results from noiseless simulation, calibrated-noise simulation, and real-device execution show that mitigation improves reconstruction fidelity for small Hermitian systems, particularly for deeper circuits. These findings support mitigation-aware feasibility on current NISQ devices; however, they do not establish present-day runtime advantage over optimized classical solvers. The proposed workflow is relevant to quantum optimization, quantum machine learning, and quantum chemistry, where linear-system primitives arise frequently. Future work will focus on reducing phase-estimation depth (e.g., iterative or semiclassical variants), improving compilation and benchmarking transparency, and re-evaluating larger instances on higher-fidelity hardware.
In this paper, we study the error propagation and generation in the Harrow-Hassidim-Lloyd (HHL) quantum algorithm runs on IBM-Q hardware with the help of a MATLAB simulator. HHL is a quantum algorithm that can provide exponential speedup over the fastest classical algorithm (conjugate gradient method) in solving systems of linear equations (SLE). However, without error correction, it cannot give correct results even in a 2-variable system due to its complexity. In this study, an HHL quantum circuit for a 2-variable SLE is implemented in IBM-Q and the error is extracted after each stage of the circuit and compared to a MATLAB simulator. We identified three major sources of errors, namely single-qubit flipping, gate infidelity, and error propagation. We also found that at the ancillary bit rotation stage, the error becomes large but the encoded solution still has high fidelity. However, the solution is mostly lost after the inverse quantum phase estimation which is necessary to extract the solution efficiently. Therefore, it is suggested that error correction resources, if limited, should be added to the second half of the circuit.
The Poisson equation has many applications across the broad areas of science and engineering. Most quantum algorithms for the Poisson solver presented so far, either suffer from lack of accuracy and/or are limited to very small sizes of the problem, and thus have no practical usage. Here we present an advanced quantum algorithm for solving the Poisson equation with high accuracy and dynamically tunable problem size. After converting the Poisson equation to the linear systems through the finite difference method, we adopt the Harrow-Hassidim-Lloyd (HHL) algorithm as the basic framework. Particularly, in this work we present an advanced circuit that ensures the accuracy of the solution by implementing non-truncated eigenvalues through eigenvalue amplification as well as by increasing the accuracy of the controlled rotation angular coefficients, which are the critical factors in the HHL algorithm. We show that our algorithm not only increases the accuracy of the solutions, but also composes more practical and scalable circuits by dynamically controlling problem size in the NISQ devices. We present both simulated and experimental results, and discuss the sources of errors. Finally, we conclude that overall results on the quantum hardware are dominated by the error in the CNOT gates.
Quantum computation offers a promising alternative to classical computing methods in many areas of numerical science, with algorithms that make use of the unique way in which quantum computers store and manipulate data often achieving dramatic improvements in performance over their classical counterparts. The potential efficiency of quantum computers is particularly important for numerical simulations, where the capabilities of classical computing systems are often insufficient for the analysis of real-world problems. In this work, we study problems involving the solution of matrix equations, for which there currently exists no efficient, general quantum procedure. We develop a generalization of the Harrow/Hassidim/Lloyd algorithm by providing an alternative unitary for eigenphase estimation. This unitary, which we have adopted from research in the area of quantum walks, has the advantage of being well defined for any arbitrary matrix equation, thereby allowing the solution procedure to be directly implemented on quantum hardware for any well-conditioned system. The procedure is most useful for sparse matrix equations, as it allows for the inverse of a matrix to be applied with O(Nnzlog(N)) complexity, where N is the number of unknowns, and Nnz is the total number of nonzero elements in the system matrix. This efficiency is independent of the matrix structure, and hence the quantum procedure can outperform classical methods for many common system types. We show this using the example of sparse approximate inverse (SPAI) preconditioning, which involves the application of matrix inverses for matrices with Nnz=O(N).