Quantum Circuits for the heat equation with physical boundary conditions via Schrodingerisation

TL;DR

This paper develops quantum circuit methods for simulating the heat equation with physical boundary conditions using Schrodingerisation, enabling quantum simulation of non-unitary PDEs with boundary constraints.

Contribution

It introduces two explicit quantum circuit approaches for handling boundary conditions in PDEs via Schrodingerisation, advancing quantum simulation techniques for non-unitary dynamics.

Findings

Two methods for inhomogeneous boundary conditions are proposed.

Complexity analysis shows efficient quantum resource requirements.

Application to heat equation demonstrates practical feasibility.

Abstract

This paper explores the explicit design of quantum circuits for quantum simulation of partial differential equations (PDEs) with physical boundary conditions. These equations and/or their discretized forms usually do not evolve via unitary dynamics, thus are not suitable for quantum simulation. Boundary conditions (either time-dependent or independent) make the problem more difficult. To tackle this challenge, the Schrodingerisation method can be employed, which converts linear partial and ordinary differential equations with non-unitary dynamics into systems of Schrodinger-type equations, via the so-called warped phase transformation that maps the equation into one higher dimension. Despite advancements in Schrodingerisation techniques, the explicit implementation of quantum circuits for solving general PDEs, especially with physical boundary conditions, remains underdeveloped. We present two methods for handling the inhomogeneous terms arising from time-dependent physical boundary conditions. One approach utilizes Duhamel's principle to express the solution in integral form and employs linear combination of unitaries (LCU) for coherent state preparation. Another method applies an augmentation to transform the inhomogeneous problem into a homogeneous one. We then apply the quantum simulation technique from [CJL23] to transform the resulting non-autonomous system to an autonomous system in one higher dimension. We provide detailed implementations of these two methods and conduct a comprehensive complexity analysis in terms of queries to the time evolution input oracle.