Solving systems of linear equations is one of the most important primitives in many different areas, including in optimization, simulation, and machine learning. Quantum algorithms for solving linear systems have the potential to provide a quantum advantage for these problems. In this work, we recall the Chebyshev iterative method and the corresponding optimal polynomial approximation of the inverse. We show that the Chebyshev iteration polynomial can be efficiently evaluated both using quantum singular value transformation (QSVT) as well as linear combination of unitaries (LCU). We achieve this by bounding the 1-norm of the coefficients of the polynomial expressed in the Chebyshev basis. This leads to a considerable constant-factor improvement in the runtime of quantum linear system solvers that are based on LCU or QSVT (or, conversely, a several orders of magnitude smaller error with the same runtime/circuit depth).
Solving systems of linear equations is one of the most important primitives in many different areas, including in optimization, simulation, and machine learning. Quantum algorithms for solving linear systems have the potential to provide a quantum advantage for these problems. In this work, we recall the Chebyshev iterative method and the corresponding optimal polynomial approximation of the inverse. We show that the Chebyshev iteration polynomial can be efficiently evaluated both using quantum singular value transformation (QSVT) as well as linear combination of unitaries (LCU). We achieve this by bounding the 1-norm of the coefficients of the polynomial expressed in the Chebyshev basis. This leads to a considerable constant-factor improvement in the runtime of quantum linear system solvers that are based on LCU or QSVT (or, conversely, a several orders of magnitude smaller error with the same runtime/circuit depth).
Solving systems of linear equations is one of the most important primitives in quantum computing that has the potential to provide a practical quantum advantage in many different areas, including in optimization, simulation, and machine learning. In this work, we revisit quantum linear system solvers from the perspective of convex optimization, and in particular gradient descent-type algorithms. This leads to a considerable constant-factor improvement in the runtime (or, conversely, a several orders of magnitude smaller error with the same runtime/circuit depth). More precisely, we first show how the asymptotically optimal quantum linear system solver of Childs, Kothari, and Somma is related to the gradient descent algorithm on the convex function ∥Ax−b∥22: their linear system solver is based on a truncation in the Chebyshev basis of the degree-(t−1) polynomial (in A) that maps the initial solution x1:=b to the t-th iterate xt in the basic gradient descent algorithm. Then, instead of starting from the basic gradient descent algorithm, we use the optimal Chebyshev iteration method (which can be viewed as an accelerated gradient descent algorithm) and show that this leads to considerable improvements in the quantum solver.
Solving systems of linear equations is a key subroutine in many quantum algorithms. In the last 15 years, many quantum linear solvers (QLS) have been developed, competing to achieve the best asymptotic worst-case complexity. Most QLS assume fault-tolerant quantum computers, so they cannot yet be benchmarked on real hardware. Because an algorithm with better asymptotic scaling can underperform on instances of practical interest, the question of which of these algorithms is the most promising remains open. In this work, we implement a method to partially address this question. We consider four well-known QLS algorithms which directly implement an approximate matrix inversion function: the Harrow-Hassidim-Lloyd algorithm, two algorithms utilizing a linear combination of unitaries, and one utilizing the quantum singular value transformation (QSVT). These methods, known as functional QLS, share nearly identical assumptions about the problem setup and oracle access. Their computational cost is dominated by query calls to a matrix oracle encoding the problem one wants to solve. We provide formulas to count the number of queries needed to solve specific problem instances; these can be used to benchmark the algorithms on real-life instances, under benevolent, idealized assumptions, without requiring access to quantum hardware to implement the procedure. We select three data sets: random generated instances that obey the assumptions of functional QLS, linear systems from simplex iterations on MIPLIB, and Poisson equations. Our methods can be easily extended to other data sets and provide a high-level guide to evaluate the performance of a QLS algorithm. In particular, our work shows that HHL underperforms in comparison to the other methods across all data sets, often by orders of magnitude, while the Chebyshev-approximation based methods typically have the best performance.
The Harrow-Hassidim-Lloyd (HHL) quantum algorithm for sampling from the solution of a linear system provides an exponential speed-up over its classical counterpart. The problem of solving a system of linear equations has a wide scope of applications, and thus HHL constitutes an important algorithmic primitive. In these notes, we present the HHL algorithm and its improved versions in detail, including explanations of the constituent sub- routines. More specifically, we discuss various quantum subroutines such as quantum phase estimation and amplitude amplification, as well as the important question of loading data into a quantum computer, via quantum RAM. The improvements to the original algorithm exploit variable-time amplitude amplification as well as a method for implementing linear combinations of unitary operations (LCUs) based on a decomposition of the operators using Fourier and Chebyshev series. Finally, we discuss a linear solver based on the quantum singular value estimation (QSVE) subroutine.
Quantum linear system solvers typically realize the inverse map as a polynomial transformation of the spectrum, so their practical cost hinges on implementing this transformation at a low polynomial degree. We introduce constrained optimal polynomials as a framework for this task, drawing on classical Krylov subspace theory. Within this framework, we develop two classes of solvers. Constrained Uniform Polynomial (CUP) solvers optimize the tradeoff between approximation accuracy and block encoding normalization under a uniform spectral model consistent with the available bounds. Constrained Adaptive Polynomial (CAP) solvers retain this structure but replace the uniform model with a probability measure reconstructed from spectral moments via a maximum entropy ansatz, where the moments are extracted from QSVT measurements. Numerical experiments under hardware and stochastic noise show that these methods achieve lower error than standard QSVT-based and Chebyshev-iteration-type solvers, particularly in noise-limited regimes. CUP offers robust performance under generic spectra, while CAP provides further improvement when the spectral structure can be exploited.
Quantum matrix inversion with the quantum singular value transformation (QSVT) requires a polynomial approximation to 1/x. Several methods from the literature construct polynomials that achieve the known degree complexity O(κlog(κ/ε)) with condition number κ and uniform error ε. However, the \emph{optimal} polynomial with lowest degree for fixed error ε can only be approximated numerically with the resource-intensive Remez method, leading to impractical preprocessing runtimes. Here, we derive an analytic shortcut to the optimal polynomial. Comparisons with other polynomials from the literature, based on Taylor expansion, Chebyshev iteration, and convex optimization, confirm that our result is optimal. Furthermore, for large κlog(κ/ε), our polynomial has the smallest maximum value on [−1,1] of all approaches considered, leading to reduced circuit depth due to the normalization condition of QSVT. With the Python code provided, this paper will also be useful for practitioners in the field.
Many computational fluid dynamics (CFD) algorithms solve partial differential equations by discretization, resulting in large and sparse systems of linear equations. While iterative methods are widely used to solve these systems classically, most existing quantum linear system solvers target the solution through matrix inversion rather than approximating it using an iterative procedure. In this work, we develop a quantum implementation of the Jacobi method based on quantum singular value transformation (QSVT). By reformulating the Jacobi iteration as a polynomial transformation of a block-encoded operator, the algorithm requires only a constant ancilla overhead with respect to the number of iterations while maintaining a circuit depth that scales linearly with the iteration number. We demonstrate the algorithm for one- and two-dimensional Poisson problems, including the pressure Poisson equation arising in Chorin's projection method for the lid-driven cavity flow. The proposed algorithm provides a promising building block for future quantum implementations of multigrid methods and preconditioning techniques, bringing quantum algorithms closer to established CFD solution strategies.