Linear-combination-of-unitaries decomposition for the Laplace operator
Phys. Rev. A 114, 012455 – Published 24 July, 2026
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1103/vdnz-1lsn
Abstract
We provide alternative 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.
