• Accepted Paper

Classical analog emulation of quantum circuits via time-averaged dynamic states

Matias Miguel Castillo Valle, Tim Tuuva, Benjamin Apffel, Hervé Lissek, Romain Fleury, and Mathieu Padlewski

Phys. Rev. Applied - Accepted 23 October, 2026

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1103/1d5g-5s8g

Abstract

Between the digital and quantum paradigms lies the emerging field of quantum-inspired analog computing, in which classical waves emulate quantum circuits. We introduce wavebits — classical wave analogs of qubits whose amplitudes are carried by physical oscillatory signals — and show that any nonseparable N-qubit state can be encoded in 2N narrowband signals that remain locally separable at every instant; the nonseparable correlations are recovered at readout by time-averaged demodulation over auxiliary carrier frequencies, the nonseparability channels. We prove that any two-qubit gate unravels into the time-averaged tensor product of two local time-varying operators, and that arbitrary circuits are emulated with a base-frequency count scaling linearly in the number of entangling two-qubit gates, independent of qubit number for a fixed gate count. The exponential cost of the 2^N-dimensional state reappears at readout and in the averaging time of circuits with many two-qubit gates, not in circuit execution, as quantified by an analytic error bound that doubles as a hardware design rule. A mixed-signal prototype emulates Bell state generation, controlled-NOT gates, phase kickback, and Bloch-sphere rotations at fidelities above 0.99, and numerical benchmarks against exact statevectors validate the scheme for up to six qubits. The architecture is directly implementable in acoustic, photonic, and mixed-signal platforms.

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