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Main Authors: Dubovitskii, Viacheslav, Utro, Filippo, Bose, Aritra, Parida, Laxmi, Maniscalco, Sabrina, Filippov, Sergey N.
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
Subjects:
Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.24053
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author Dubovitskii, Viacheslav
Utro, Filippo
Bose, Aritra
Parida, Laxmi
Maniscalco, Sabrina
Filippov, Sergey N.
author_facet Dubovitskii, Viacheslav
Utro, Filippo
Bose, Aritra
Parida, Laxmi
Maniscalco, Sabrina
Filippov, Sergey N.
contents Quantum walks provide a versatile framework for probing the structural and dynamical properties of complex systems ranging from biological networks to synthetic materials. However, their realization on current noisy pre-fault-tolerant quantum computers is fundamentally limited by decoherence. Conventional dense encodings of graph structures require prohibitively deep circuits, making them incompatible with existing hardware. Here we introduce an algorithm that leverages symmetry-sector encoding and trades circuit depth for qubits, while integrating symmetry-respecting postselection as an effective noise-mitigation strategy. This combination enables us to execute practical quantum-walk circuits for biological networks on actual quantum hardware. We benchmark the proposed methodology against known state-of-the-art circuit architectures, highlighting significant reduction of circuit depth in our approach at the cost of moderate qubit overhead. Utilizing 40 qubits, we implement quantum walks on complex graphs containing up to 17 nodes and 20 edges -- the largest experiment on superconducting hardware to date, with the Hellinger fidelity exceeding 87% throughout 7 steps. We present a case study that illustrates how experimentally obtained quantum-walk dynamics on a protein-protein-interaction network can be applied to prioritizing disease-associated genes. We discuss the framework scalability in the pre-fault-tolerant era and its potential for studying larger biological networks.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2602_24053
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Experimental implementation of a discrete-time quantum walk on biological networks
Dubovitskii, Viacheslav
Utro, Filippo
Bose, Aritra
Parida, Laxmi
Maniscalco, Sabrina
Filippov, Sergey N.
Quantum Physics
Quantum walks provide a versatile framework for probing the structural and dynamical properties of complex systems ranging from biological networks to synthetic materials. However, their realization on current noisy pre-fault-tolerant quantum computers is fundamentally limited by decoherence. Conventional dense encodings of graph structures require prohibitively deep circuits, making them incompatible with existing hardware. Here we introduce an algorithm that leverages symmetry-sector encoding and trades circuit depth for qubits, while integrating symmetry-respecting postselection as an effective noise-mitigation strategy. This combination enables us to execute practical quantum-walk circuits for biological networks on actual quantum hardware. We benchmark the proposed methodology against known state-of-the-art circuit architectures, highlighting significant reduction of circuit depth in our approach at the cost of moderate qubit overhead. Utilizing 40 qubits, we implement quantum walks on complex graphs containing up to 17 nodes and 20 edges -- the largest experiment on superconducting hardware to date, with the Hellinger fidelity exceeding 87% throughout 7 steps. We present a case study that illustrates how experimentally obtained quantum-walk dynamics on a protein-protein-interaction network can be applied to prioritizing disease-associated genes. We discuss the framework scalability in the pre-fault-tolerant era and its potential for studying larger biological networks.
title Experimental implementation of a discrete-time quantum walk on biological networks
topic Quantum Physics
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.24053