SIAM Undergraduate Research Online
A Practical Guide to Model Problems in Quantum Linear Algebra: Theory and Experiment
Alexander Weiss, Paul Bruzzi
Abstract
We present a comprehensive and pedagogical study of two core quantum algorithms in quantum linear algebra: the Hadamard test (HT) and quantum phase estimation (QPE).Building on the lecture notes on Quantum Algorithms for Scientific Computing [1] by Lin, we detail their mathematical formulations, circuit implementations, and convergence behavior.Both algorithms are benchmarked on simulators and IBM's 127-qubit Eagle processor (ibm rensselaer) using a simple eigenvalue problem.While QPE performs well in simulation, its hardware performance degrades beyond t = 3 ancilla qubits due to circuit depth and two-qubit gate error.In contrast, HT shows stable samplingbased convergence and greater resilience to hardware noise.These results provide a realistic baseline for implementing phase estimation on noisy intermediate-scale quantum (NISQ) era devices.