Quantum Lattice Boltzmann with Denoising Collision Operators

TL;DR

This paper proposes a quantum lattice Boltzmann method using a denoising collision operator that avoids tomography, enabling efficient, coherent multi-timestep quantum fluid simulations with high accuracy.

Contribution

It introduces a geometric, projection-based collision operator for quantum LBM that eliminates the need for repeated tomography, improving efficiency and coherence.

Findings

Accurately reproduces macroscopic fluid behaviors in simulations.

Demonstrates high accuracy depending on the reference state.

Provides a complete quantum pipeline with gate-level implementation.

Abstract

The Lattice Boltzmann method (LBM) is a well-established mesoscopic approach for simulating fluid dynamics by evolving particle distribution functions on discrete lattices. While the LBM is highly parallelizable on classical hardware, its translation to quantum algorithms is impeded by the collision process, which is intrinsically nonlinear and irreversible. Several existing quantum formulations implement this process through repeated quantum tomography and state preparation at every timestep, leading to significant overheads. We introduce a quantum LBM based on a denoising-type collision operator that avoids tomography-based updates. The collision dynamics are reformulated as an orthogonal projection onto the linearized manifold of equilibrium distributions around a reference state. This geometric approach filters non-equilibrium components while preserving lattice symmetries and approximating nonlinear terms needed to recover hydrodynamic behavior. A complete pipeline is presented with efficient gate-level realizations, incorporating encoding of distributions, collision, streaming, boundary conditions, and measurement of physical quantities such as hydrodynamic forces. In addition, we outline an approach for implementing projector-based operators deterministically without postselection, paving the way to fully coherent multi-timestep LBM simulations. Numerical experiments for advection-diffusion and flow problems demonstrate that the method reproduces macroscopic behaviors with high accuracy, with performance depending on the choice of reference state.