We ask how much energy is required to weakly simulate an n-qubit quantum circuit (i.e., produce samples from its output distribution) by a unitary circuit in a hybrid qubit-oscillator model. The latter consists of a certain number of bosonic modes coupled to a constant number of qubits by a Jaynes-Cummings Hamiltonian. We find that efficient approximate weak simulation of an n-qubit quantum circuit of polynomial size with inverse polynomial error is possible with (1) a linear number of bosonic modes and a polynomial amount of energy, or (2) a sublinear (polynomial) number of modes and a subexponential amount of energy, or (3) a constant number of modes and an exponential amount of energy. Our construction encodes qubits into high-dimensional approximate Gottesman-Kitaev-Preskill (GKP) codes. It provides new insight into the trade-off between system size (i.e., number of modes) and the amount of energy required to perform quantum computation in the continuous-variable setting.
@article{arxiv.2509.18854,
title = {Trading modes against energy},
author = {Lukas Brenner and Beatriz Dias and Robert Koenig},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2509.18854},
year = {2025}
}