A Linear Combination of Unitaries Decomposition for the Laplace Operator

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Hogancamp, Thomas, Demirdjian, Reuben, Gunlycke, Daniel
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
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author Hogancamp, Thomas
Demirdjian, Reuben
Gunlycke, Daniel
author_facet Hogancamp, Thomas
Demirdjian, Reuben
Gunlycke, Daniel
contents We provide novel linear combination of unitaries decompositions for a class of discrete elliptic differential operators. Specifically, Poisson problems augmented with periodic, Dirichlet, Neumann, Robin, and mixed boundary conditions are considered on the unit interval and on higher-dimensional rectangular domains. The number of unitary terms required for our decomposition is independent of the number of grid points used in the discretization and scales linearly with the spatial dimension. Explicit circuit constructions for each unitary are given and their complexities analyzed. The worst case depth and elementary gate cost of any such circuit is shown to scale at most logarithmically with respect to number of grid points in the underlying discrete system. We also investigate the cost of using our method within the Variational Quantum Linear Solver algorithm and show favorable scaling. Finally, we extend the proposed decomposition technique to treat problems that include first-order derivative terms with variable coefficients.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2601_06370
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle A Linear Combination of Unitaries Decomposition for the Laplace Operator
Hogancamp, Thomas
Demirdjian, Reuben
Gunlycke, Daniel
Quantum Physics
Numerical Analysis
We provide novel linear combination of unitaries decompositions for a class of discrete elliptic differential operators. Specifically, Poisson problems augmented with periodic, Dirichlet, Neumann, Robin, and mixed boundary conditions are considered on the unit interval and on higher-dimensional rectangular domains. The number of unitary terms required for our decomposition is independent of the number of grid points used in the discretization and scales linearly with the spatial dimension. Explicit circuit constructions for each unitary are given and their complexities analyzed. The worst case depth and elementary gate cost of any such circuit is shown to scale at most logarithmically with respect to number of grid points in the underlying discrete system. We also investigate the cost of using our method within the Variational Quantum Linear Solver algorithm and show favorable scaling. Finally, we extend the proposed decomposition technique to treat problems that include first-order derivative terms with variable coefficients.
title A Linear Combination of Unitaries Decomposition for the Laplace Operator
topic Quantum Physics
Numerical Analysis
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.06370