Designing a Hybrid Digital / Analog Quantum Physics Emulator as Open Hardware

TL;DR

This paper proposes a hybrid digital-analog quantum emulator design that encodes quantum states into classical signals, aiming to emulate up to 20 qubits with practical hardware, addressing scalability and measurement challenges.

Contribution

It introduces a novel encoding scheme for quantum information into classical signals, enabling scalable hybrid quantum emulation with fixed hardware components.

Findings

Encoding method scales favorably with qubit number

Feasibility of emulating up to 20 qubits with current hardware

Measurement time does not scale poorly with system complexity

Abstract

One of the most exciting quantum emulation [1] breakthroughs was the first analog signal-based emulation of a universal quantum computer [2]. This yielded a very interesting paper, but no practical use - even for theorists. The reason for this was that a signal duration of the approximate age of the universe (13.77 billion years) could accommodate only about 95 qubits. We propose a new scheme with the following properties: 1) a pair of oscillators or sinusioidal wave sources must be sufficient to emulate n superimposed states with the ability to be identifiably mixed or entangled, 2) the time required to perform a measurement of a state must not scale poorly with the complexity of the state, 3) a fixed set of hardware components must be sufficient to emulate a system of a significant number of qubits, and 4) at least as much must be knowable about an emulated quantum state as is expected to be measurable in a theoretical quantum computing system. We achieve a design whose time complexity scales favourably based on a new method of encoding quantum information into classical signals, but only anticipate the feasibility of encodings of up to 20 qubits with modern electrical hardware.