A quantum algorithm for advection-diffusion equation by a probabilistic imaginary-time evolution operator

In this paper, we propose a quantum algorithm for solving the linear advection-diffusion equation by employing a new approximate probabilistic imaginary-time evolution (PITE) operator which improves the existing approximate PITE. First, the effectiveness of the proposed approximate PITE operator is justified by the theoretical evaluation of the error. Next, we construct the explicit quantum circuit for realizing the imaginary-time evolution of the Hamiltonian coming from the advection-diffusion equation, whose gate complexity is logarithmic regarding the size of the discretized Hamiltonian matrix. Numerical simulations using gate-based quantum emulator for 1D/2D examples are also provided to support our algorithm. Finally, we extend our algorithm to the coupled system of advection-diffusion equations, and we also compare our proposed algorithm to some other algorithms in the previous works. We find that our algorithm gives comparable result to the Harrow-Hassidim-Lloyd (HHL) algorithm with similar gate complexity, while we need much less ancillary qubits. Besides, our algorithm outperforms a specific HHL algorithm and a variational quantum algorithm (VQA) based on the finite difference method (FDM).
Comment: 58 pages, 23 figures