A Polylogarithmic-Time Quantum Algorithm for the Laplace Transform

Abstract

We introduce a quantum algorithm to perform the Laplace transform on quantum computers. Already, the quantum Fourier transform (QFT) is the cornerstone of many quantum algorithms, but the Laplace transform or its discrete version has not seen any efficient implementation on quantum computers due to its dissipative nature and hence non-unitary dynamics. However, a recent work has shown an efficient implementation for certain cases on quantum computers using the Taylor series. Unlike previous work, our work provides a completely different algorithm for doing Laplace Transform using Quantum Eigenvalue Transformation and Lap-LCHS, very efficiently at points which form an arithmetic progression. Our algorithm can implement $N \times N$ discrete Laplace transform in gate complexity that grows as $O((log\,N)^3)$, ignoring the state preparation cost, where $N=2^n$ and $n$ is the number of qubits, which is a superpolynomial speedup in number of gates over the best classical counterpart that has complexity $O(N\cdot log\,N)$ for the same cases. Also, the circuit width grows as $O(log\,N)$. Quantum Laplace Transform (QLT) may enable new Quantum algorithms for cases like solving differential equations in the Laplace domain, developing an inverse Laplace transform algorithm on quantum computers, imaginary time evolution in the resolvent domain for calculating ground state energy, and spectral estimation of non-Hermitian matrices.