Efficient classical simulation of open bosonic quantum systems

TL;DR

This paper introduces a new computational method for efficiently simulating the dynamics of open bosonic quantum systems, significantly reducing memory usage and enabling parallelization, which is useful for quantum processor verification.

Contribution

The paper presents a novel approach that maps operators to complex functions and solves PDEs, offering quadratic memory savings and parallelization capabilities for simulating open bosonic systems.

Findings

Quadratic reduction in memory consumption compared to direct methods

Efficient parallelization of the simulation process

Potential application in verifying superconducting quantum processors

Abstract

We propose a computationally efficient method to solve the dynamics of operators of bosonic quantum systems coupled to their environments. The method maps the operator under interest to a set of complex-valued functions, and its adjoint master equation to a set of partial differential equations for these functions, which are subsequently solved numerically. In the limit of weak coupling to the environment, the mapping of the operator enables storing the operator efficiently during the simulation, leading to approximately quadratic improvement in the memory consumption compared with the direct approach of solving the adjoint master equation in the number basis, while retaining the computation time comparable. Moreover, the method enables efficient parallelization which allows to optimize for the actual computational time to reach an approximately quadratic speed up, while retaining the memory consumption comparable to the direct approach. We foresee the method to prove useful, e.g., for the verification of the operation of superconducting quantum processors.