Quantum Differential Equation Solvers with Low State Preparation Cost: Eliminating the Time Dependence in Dissipative Equations

Abstract

Linear dissipative differential equation is a fundamental model for a large number of physical systems, such as quantum dynamics with non-Hermitian Hamiltonian, open quantum system dynamics, diffusion process and damped system. In this work, we propose efficient quantum algorithms for simulating linear dissipative differential equations. The key idea of our algorithms is to perform the simulation only over an effective time period when the dynamics has not significantly dissipated yet, rather than over the entire physical evolution period. We conduct detailed analysis on the complexity of our algorithms and show that, while maintaining low state preparation cost, our algorithms can completely eliminate the time dependence. This is a more than exponential improvement compared to the previous state-of-the-art quantum algorithms.