Embedding classical dynamics in a quantum computer

Abstract

We develop a framework for simulating measure-preserving, ergodic dynamical systems on a quantum computer. Our approach provides a new operator-theoretic representation of classical dynamics by combining ergodic theory with quantum information science. The resulting quantum embedding of classical dynamics (QECD) enables efficient simulation of spaces of classical observables with exponentially large dimension using a quadratic number of quantum gates. The QECD framework is based on a quantum feature map for representing classical states by density operators on a reproducing kernel Hilbert space, $\mathcal H $, and an embedding of classical observables into self-adjoint operators on $\mathcal H$. In this scheme, quantum states and observables evolve unitarily under the lifted action of Koopman evolution operators of the classical system. Moreover, by virtue of the reproducing property of $\mathcal H$, the quantum system is pointwise-consistent with the underlying classical dynamics. To achieve an exponential quantum computational advantage, we project the state of the quantum system to a density matrix on a $2^n$-dimensional tensor product Hilbert space associated with $n$ qubits. By employing discrete Fourier-Walsh transforms, the evolution operator of the finite-dimensional quantum system is factorized into tensor product form, enabling implementation through a quantum circuit of size $O(n)$. Furthermore, the circuit features a state preparation stage, also of size $O(n)$, and a quantum Fourier transform stage of size $O(n^2)$, which makes predictions of observables possible by measurement in the standard computational basis. We prove theoretical convergence results for these predictions as $n\to\infty$. We present simulated quantum circuit experiments in Qiskit Aer, as well as actual experiments on the IBM Quantum System One.