Quantum simulation for partial differential equations with physical boundary or interface conditions

Abstract

This paper explores the feasibility of quantum simulation for partial differential equations (PDEs) with physical boundary or interface conditions. Semi-discretization of such problems does not necessarily yield Hamiltonian dynamics and even alters the Hamiltonian structure of the dynamics when boundary and interface conditions are included. This seemingly intractable issue can be resolved by using a recently introduced Schrödingerisation method [1,2] – it converts any linear PDEs and ODEs with non-Hermitian dynamics to a system of Schrödinger equations, via the so-called warped phase transformation that maps the equation into one higher dimension. We implement this method for several typical problems, including the linear convection equation with inflow boundary conditions and the heat equation with Dirichlet and Neumann boundary conditions. For interface problems we study the (parabolic) Stefan problem, linear convection, and linear Liouville equations with discontinuous and even measure-valued coefficients. We perform numerical experiments to demonstrate the validity of this approach, which helps to bridge the gap between available quantum algorithms and computational models for classical and quantum dynamics with boundary and interface conditions.