Quantum algorithms for the exponentiation of Toeplitz matrices and applications in partial differential equations

Abstract

We present quantum algorithms to approximate the exponential of banded Toeplitz matrices. These matrices have central importance in many PDE related problems, but their quantum implementation is hindered by their possibly large norms. Constructing directly the exponential we can circumvent this limitation. By relating the lower/upper shift operators to circulant and skewcirculant generators, which are diagonalised by the QFT, we construct (i) an LCU-based block encoding of banded Toeplitz matrices, (ii) an efficient, controllably truncated Pauli-string decomposition of the circulant eigenphases with a closed-form error bound, and (iii) a specialized QFT-Trotter product formula. As an application we build a block encoding of the propagator of the discretised heat equation with periodic, Dirichlet and Neumann boundary conditions, using a frequency cutoff.