English

Exponential Reduction of Mesh Dependence in Quantum Estimation of Parabolic PDE Observables

Quantum Physics 2026-07-20 v1

Abstract

Can a quantum PDE algorithm avoid the polynomial cost of resolving a fine spatial mesh? For standard fixed-order discretizations, direct classical methods require work polynomial in h1h^{-1}, or equivalently in the number of spatial degrees of freedom Nh=Θ(hd)N_h=\Theta(h^{-d}). Direct quantum implementations of a parabolic semigroup still have coherent complexity O~(T/h)\widetilde{\mathcal O}(\sqrt{T}/h), and gradient-dependent observables such as heat flux and dissipation introduce additional mesh dependence. Decay of the solution norm will further suppress the postselection probability for preparing a normalized final state. We develop a multilevel quantum algorithm that estimates linear and quadratic observables directlydirectly and places the fine--coarse cancellation inside the circuit before measurement. A contour-based LCU reconstructs each target-time correction from a coherent family of shifted resolvent differences. Rather than block encoding the fine and coarse inverses separately, we encode their difference through a shifted Ritz--Schur factorization, exposing its O(h2)\mathcal O(h_\ell^2) two-grid normalization. For Fourier hierarchies, the corresponding SELECT oracle consists of a quantum Fourier or sine transform, a spectral-band selector, and reversible diagonal arithmetic. We also give a non-Fourier realization based on energy-orthogonal dyadic midpoint details in one dimension, together with structured tensor-product extensions under fixed-rank coefficient and access assumptions. For readouts with derivative order 0χ20\le\chi\le2, optimized amplitude estimation removes allall polynomial dependence on the finest mesh size. Under the stated access assumptions, both linear and quadratic observables can be estimated with complexity O~(1+(Tϵ)1)\widetilde{\mathcal O}(1+(T\epsilon)^{-1}), with only polylogarithmic dependence on h1h^{-1}.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2607.18113,
  title  = {Exponential Reduction of Mesh Dependence in Quantum Estimation of Parabolic PDE Observables},
  author = {Xiantao Li},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2607.18113},
  year   = {2026}
}