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Quantum Kaczmarz Algorithm for Solving Linear Algebraic Equations

Quantum Physics 2026-01-06 v1

Abstract

We introduce a quantum linear system solving algorithm based on the Kaczmarz method, a widely used workhorse for large linear systems and least-squares problems that updates the solution by enforcing one equation at a time. Its simplicity and low memory cost make it a practical choice across data regression, tomographic reconstruction, and optimization. In contrast to many existing quantum linear solvers, our method does not rely on oracle access to query entries, relaxing a key practicality bottleneck. In particular, when the rank of the system of interest is sufficiently small and the rows of the matrix of interest admit an appropriate structure, we achieve circuit complexity O(1εlogm)\mathcal{O}\left(\frac{1}{\varepsilon}\log m\right), where mm is the number of variables and ε\varepsilon is the target precision, without dependence on the sparsity ss, and could possibly be without explicit dependence on condition number κ\kappa. This shows a significant improvement over previous quantum linear solvers where the dependence on κ,s\kappa,s is at least linear. At the same time, when the rows have an arbitrary structure and have at most ss nonzero entries, we obtain the circuit depth O(1εlogs)\mathcal{O}\left(\frac{1}{\varepsilon}\log s\right) using extra O(s)\mathcal{O}(s) ancilla qubits, so the depth grows only logarithmically with sparsity ss. When the sparsity ss grows as O(logm)\mathcal{O}(\log m), then our method can achieve an exponential improvement with respect to circuit depth compared to existing quantum algorithms, while using (asymptotically) the same amount of qubits.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2601.01342,
  title  = {Quantum Kaczmarz Algorithm for Solving Linear Algebraic Equations},
  author = {Nhat A. Nghiem and Tuan K. Do and Trung V. Phan},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2601.01342},
  year   = {2026}
}