A Quantum Algorithm for Linear PDEs Arising in Finance

Abstract

We propose a hybrid quantum-classical algorithm, originated from quantum chemistry, to price European and Asian options in the Black-Scholes model. Our approach is based on the equivalence between the pricing partial differential equation and the Schrodinger equation in imaginary time. We devise a strategy to build a shallow quantum circuit approximation to this equation, only requiring few qubits. This constitutes a promising candidate for the application of Quantum Computing techniques (with large number of qubits affected by noise) in Quantitative Finance.