- Accepted Paper
Hamiltonian simulation for 3D elastic wave equations in homogeneous elastic media
Phys. Rev. Applied - Accepted 14 October, 2026
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1103/qz5r-pgbv
Phys. Rev. Applied - Accepted 14 October, 2026
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1103/qz5r-pgbv
We present an explicit quantum circuit construction for Hamiltonian simulation of a first-order velocity–stress formulation of the three-dimensional elastic wave equation in homogeneous isotropic media. Previous studies have shown how elastic wave equations can be cast into forms amenable to Hamiltonian simulation, but they typically rely on black box Hamiltonian access assumptions, making gate complexity estimation difficult. Starting from the first-order velocity–stress formulation, we discretize the system by finite differences, transform it into Schrödinger form, and exploit the separation between the component register and the spatial register to decompose the Hamiltonian into structured tensor product terms. This yields explicit implementations of first-order and second-order Trotter formulas for the resulting time evolution operator. We derive the corresponding error bounds and qubit and CNOT complexity estimates with explicit constants in terms of the discretization parameter, simulation time, target accuracy, and material parameters, exhibiting polynomially better upper bounds in time complexity compared with those of classical finite difference methods. Numerical experiments compare the analytical CNOT gate-count bounds with the compiled CNOT gate counts and validate the proposed framework against the exact evolution.
If the author has provided any supplemental materials with this article they will be available upon publication of the version of record.