• Accepted Paper

Provable Quantum Speedups for Reaction-Rate Estimation in High-Dimensional Fokker-Planck Dynamics

Tyler Kharazi, Ahmad M. Alkadri, Kranthi K. Mandadapu, and K. Birgitta Whaley

PRX Quantum - Accepted 21 July, 2026

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1103/r888-s8t3

Abstract

The Fokker-Planck equation models rare events across sciences, but its high-dimensional nature challenges classical computers. Quantum algorithms for such non-unitary dynamics often suffer from exponential {decay in} success probability. We introduce a quantum algorithm that overcomes this bottleneck for estimating reaction rates. Using a sum-of-squares representation, we develop a Gaussian linear combination of Hamiltonian simulations (Gaussian-LCHS) to represent the non-unitary propagator with O(t∥H∥log(1/ϵ)) queries to its block encoding. Crucially, we pair this with {a} novel technique to directly estimate matrix elements without exponential decay. For η pairwise interacting particles discretized with N plane waves per degree of freedom, we estimate reactive flux to error ϵ using Õ((η5/2tβαV+η3/2t/βN)/ϵ) quantum gates, where αV=maxr|V′(r)/r|. We further prove that under comparable worst-case analytical guarantees, the sharpest classical bounds for estimating reaction rates via simulation of the associated overdamped Langevin dynamics scale as O(tη2eΩ(η)/ϵ4), yielding an exponential improvement in η, a quartic speedup in ϵ, and quadratic speedup in the time horizon t. While classical algorithms may outperform these bounds in practice, this work demonstrates a rigorous route toward quantum advantage for high-dimensional dissipative dynamics.

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