Reuse & Permissions

It is not necessary to obtain permission to reuse this article or its components as it is available under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license. This license permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided attribution to the author(s) and the published article's title, journal citation, and DOI are maintained. Please note that some figures may have been included with permission from other third parties. It is your responsibility to obtain the proper permission from the rights holder directly for these figures.

Export citation

Export citation

Choose format for download:

Download Citation
  • Open Access

Divergence-free algorithms for solving nonlinear differential equations on quantum computers

Katsuhiro Endo* and Kazuaki Z. Takahashi†

  • *Contact author: katsuhiro.endo@aist.go.jp
  • †Contact author: kazu.takahashi@aist.go.jp

Phys. Rev. Research 8, 013057 – Published 20 January, 2026

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1103/2hfp-qyz1

Abstract

From weather to neural networks, modeling is not only useful for understanding various phenomena but also has a wide range of potential applications. Although nonlinear differential equations are extremely useful tools in modeling, their solutions are difficult to obtain. Based on the expectation of quantum transcendence, quantum algorithms for efficiently solving nonlinear differential equations continue to be developed. However, even the latest promising algorithm has been pointed out to have an evolution time limit. This limit is the theoretically predestined divergence of solutions. We propose algorithms of divergence-free simulation for nonlinear differential equations in quantum computers. For Hamiltonian simulations, a pivot state s is introduced in the neighborhood of state x to be solved. Divergence of the solutions is prevented by moving s to a neighborhood of x whenever x leaves the neighborhood of s. Since updating s is directly related to computational cost, to minimize the number of updates, the nonlinear differential equations are approximated by nonlinear polynomials around s, which are then Carleman linearized. Hamiltonian simulations of nonlinear differential equations based on several representative models are performed to show that the proposed methods break through the theoretical evolution time limit. Furthermore, we demonstrate that the proposed methods work well on an actual quantum computer. The solution of nonlinear differential equations free from evolution time constraints opens the door to practical applications of quantum computers.

View figure in article

Physics Subject Headings (PhySH)

Article Text

References (45)

  1. B. P. Zeigler, H. Praehofer, and T. G. Kim, Theory of Modeling and Simulation (Academic Press, New York, 2000).
  2. S. Manabe and R. T. Wetherald, Thermal equilibrium of the atmosphere with a given distribution of relative humidity, J. Atmos. Sci. 24, 241 (1967).
  3. P. M. Cox, R. A. Betts, C. D. Jones, S. A. Spall, and I. J. Totterdell, Acceleration of global warming due to carbon-cycle feedbacks in a coupled climate model, Nature (London) 408, 184 (2000).
  4. F. Rosenblatt, The perceptron: A probabilistic model for information storage and organization in the brain, Psychol. Rev. 65, 386 (1958).
  5. A. Krizhevsky, I. Sutskever, and G. E. Hinton, Imagenet classification with deep convolutional neural networks, Adv. Neural Inf. Process. Syst. 25, 1097 (2012).
  6. D. Frenkel and B. Smit, Understanding Molecular Simulation: From Algorithms to Applications (Elsevier, San Diego, 2023).
  7. J. H. Ferziger, M. Perić, and R. L. Street, Computational Methods for Fluid Dynamics (Springer, Cham, 2019).
  8. H. W. Hethcote, The mathematics of infectious diseases, SIAM Rev. 42, 599 (2000).
  9. S. H. Strogatz, Nonlinear Dynamics and Chaos: With Applications to Physics, Biology, Chemistry, and Engineering (CRC Press, Boca Raton, 2018).
  10. A. Steane, Quantum computing, Rep. Prog. Phys. 61, 117 (1998).
  11. T. E. O’Brien, B. Tarasinski, and B. M. Terhal, Quantum phase estimation of multiple eigenvalues for small-scale (noisy) experiments, New J. Phys. 21, 023022 (2019).
  12. H. Alghassi, A. Deshmukh, N. Ibrahim, N. Robles, S. Woerner, and C. Zoufal, A variational quantum algorithm for the Feynman-Kac formula, Quantum 6, 730 (2022).
  13. R. Babbush, D. W. Berry, R. Kothari, R. D. Somma, and N. Wiebe, Exponential quantum speedup in simulating coupled classical oscillators, Phys. Rev. X 13, 041041 (2023).
  14. J. Gonzalez-Conde, Á. Rodríguez-Rozas, E. Solano, and M. Sanz, Efficient Hamiltonian simulation for solving option price dynamics, Phys. Rev. Res. 5, 043220 (2023).
  15. S. Jin, N. Liu, and Y. Yu, Quantum simulation of partial differential equations via Schrödingerization, Phys. Rev. Lett. 133, 230602 (2024).
  16. S. Jin, N. Liu, and Y. Yu, Quantum simulation of partial differential equations: Applications and detailed analysis, Phys. Rev. A 108, 032603 (2023).
  17. A. M. Childs and N. Wiebe, Hamiltonian simulation using linear combinations of unitary operations, Quantum Inf. Comput. 12, 901 (2012).
  18. D. An, A. M. Childs, and L. Lin, Quantum algorithm for linear non-unitary dynamics with near-optimal dependence on all parameters, Commun. Math. Phys. 407, 19 (2026).
  19. D. An, J.-P. Liu, and L. Lin, Linear combination of Hamiltonian simulation for nonunitary dynamics with optimal state preparation cost, Phys. Rev. Lett. 131, 150603 (2023).
  20. M. Kieferová, A. Scherer, and D. W. Berry, Simulating the dynamics of time-dependent Hamiltonians with a truncated Dyson series, Phys. Rev. A 99, 042314 (2019).
  21. D. W. Berry, A. M. Childs, R. Cleve, R. Kothari, and R. D. Somma, Simulating Hamiltonian dynamics with a truncated Taylor series, Phys. Rev. Lett. 114, 090502 (2015).
  22. G. H. Low and I. L. Chuang, Optimal Hamiltonian simulation by quantum signal processing, Phys. Rev. Lett. 118, 010501 (2017).
  23. V. Balasubramanian, M. DeCross, A. Kar, and O. Parrikar, Quantum complexity of time evolution with chaotic Hamiltonians, J. High Energy Phys. 01 (2020) 134.
  24. S. McArdle, T. Jones, S. Endo, Y. Li, S. C. Benjamin, and X. Yuan, Variational ansatz-based quantum simulation of imaginary time evolution, npj Quantum Inf. 5, 75 (2019).
  25. Z.-J. Zhang, J. Sun, X. Yuan, and M.-H. Yung, Low-depth Hamiltonian simulation by an adaptive product formula, Phys. Rev. Lett. 130, 040601 (2023).
  26. G. H. Low and I. L. Chuang, Hamiltonian simulation by qubitization, Quantum 3, 163 (2019).
  27. T. Kharazi, A. M. Alkadri, J.-P. Liu, K. K. Mandadapu, and K. B. Whaley, Explicit block encodings of boundary value problems for many-body elliptic operators, Quantum 9, 1764 (2025).
  28. S. Jin and N. Liu, Analog quantum simulation of parabolic partial differential equations using Jaynes-Cummings-like models, arXiv:2407.01913.
  29. D. Lee, S. Shon, S. Lee, and J. Ha, Size and topology optimization of truss structures using quantum-based HS algorithm, Buildings 13, 1436 (2023).
  30. B. Liu, M. Ortiz, and F. Cirak, Towards quantum computational mechanics, Comput. Methods Appl. Mech. Eng. 432, 117403 (2024).
  31. D. Wawrzyniak, J. Winter, S. Schmidt, T. Indinger, C. F. Janßen, U. Schramm, and N. A. Adams, A quantum algorithm for the lattice-Boltzmann method advection-diffusion equation, Comput. Phys. Commun. 306, 109373 (2025).
  32. R. P. Feynman, Simulating physics with computers, Int. J. Theor. Phys. 21, 467 (1982).
  33. S. Lloyd, G. De Palma, C. Gokler, B. Kiani, Z.-W. Liu, M. Marvian, F. Tennie, and T. Palmer, Quantum algorithm for nonlinear differential equations, arXiv:2011.06571.
  34. I. Joseph, Koopman–von Neumann approach to quantum simulation of nonlinear classical dynamics, Phys. Rev. Res. 2, 043102 (2020).
  35. D. Shi and X. Yang, Koopman spectral linearization vs. Carleman linearization: A computational comparison study, Mathematics 12, 2156 (2024).
  36. J.-P. Liu, H. Ø. Kolden, H. K. Krovi, N. F. Loureiro, K. Trivisa, and A. M. Childs, Efficient quantum algorithm for dissipative nonlinear differential equations, Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA 118, e2026805118 (2021).
  37. C. Sanavio, R. Scatamacchia, C. de Falco, and S. Succi, Three Carleman routes to the quantum simulation of classical fluids, Phys. Fluids 36, 057143 (2024).
  38. W. Itani, K. R. Sreenivasan, and S. Succi, Quantum algorithm for lattice Boltzmann (QALB) simulation of incompressible fluids with a nonlinear collision term, Phys. Fluids 36, 017112 (2024).
  39. W. Itani and S. Succi, Analysis of Carleman linearization of lattice Boltzmann, Fluids 7, 24 (2022).
  40. IBM quantum computers compute resources, https://quantum.cloud.ibm.com/computers, accessed on July 21, 2025.
  41. IonQ quantum systems forte, https://ionq.com/quantum-systems/forte, accessed on July 21, 2025.
  42. Fire opal, https://docs.q-ctrl.com/fire-opal, accessed on July 21, 2025.
  43. J. Dressel, M. Malik, F. M. Miatto, A. N. Jordan, and R. W. Boyd, Colloquium: Understanding quantum weak values: Basics and applications, Rev. Mod. Phys. 86, 307 (2014).
  44. G. Brassard, P. Hoyer, M. Mosca, and A. Tapp, Quantum amplitude amplification and estimation, Contemp. Math. 305, 53 (2002).
  45. https://github.com/Katsuhiro-Endo/PivotSwitchingCarleman

Outline

Information

Sign In to Your Journals Account

Filter

Filter

Article Lookup

Enter a citation