Towards End-to-End Quantum Estimation of Non-Hermitian Pseudospectra

TL;DR

This paper develops a quantum framework for efficiently determining pseudospectrum membership in non-Hermitian systems, combining quantum algorithms with classical post-processing, and demonstrates its effectiveness on a trapped-ion quantum computer.

Contribution

It introduces a novel end-to-end quantum algorithm for pseudospectrum estimation, integrating singular-value estimation and state preparation, with practical implementation on quantum hardware.

Findings

Quantum algorithm achieves Heisenberg-limited scaling.

Effective state preparation for non-Hermitian models.

Successful demonstration on trapped-ion quantum computer.

Abstract

Non-Hermitian many-body systems can be spectrally unstable, so small perturbations may induce large eigenvalue shifts. The pseudospectrum quantifies this instability and provides a perturbation-robust diagnostic. For inverse-polynomially small $\epsilon$, we show that deciding whether a point $z\in\mathbb{C}$ is $\epsilon$-close to the spectrum is PSPACE-hard for $5$-local operators, whereas deciding whether $z$ lies in the $\epsilon$-pseudospectrum is QMA-complete for $4$-local operators. This identifies pseudospectrum membership as a natural computational target. We then present a concrete end-to-end quantum framework for deciding pseudospectrum membership, which combines a singular-value estimation step with a dissipative state preparation algorithm. Our Quantum Singular-value Gaussian-filtered Search (QSIGS) combines quantum singular value transformation (QSVT) with classical post-processing to achieve Heisenberg-limited query scaling for singular-value estimation. To prepare suitable input states, we introduce an algorithmic Lindbladian protocol for approximate ground right singular vectors and prove its effectiveness for the Hatano--Nelson model. Finally, we demonstrate the full pipeline on a trapped-ion quantum computer and distinguish points inside and outside the target pseudospectrum near the exceptional point of a minimal non-Hermitian qubit model.