Robustness of Quantum Signal Processing and Resource-aware Polynomial Design

Abstract

Quantum signal processing (QSP) realizes operator functions through polynomial transformations of a finite degree. In addition to function approximation errors, realistic implementations incur algorithmic errors also when encoding the input operator and in synthesizing gates into a discrete fault-tolerant gate set. We provide an end-to-end analysis of these errors and show that the input error propagation is governed by the operator-Lipschitz constant $L_\star$ of the implemented function. We then derive an efficient classical algorithm to compute tight lower and upper bounds on $L_\star$, and we show that these bounds induce in turn lower and upper bounds on the total quantum-resource cost (for instance, $T$-gate count) needed for QSP implementations compatible with a target total error. We further devise a procedure to search for a polynomial with minimum cost based solely on its coefficients, yielding a resource-aware polynomial-design procedure for QSP. We illustrate the resulting method for ground state energy estimation via eigenvalue thresholding for the H$_6$ molecular Hamiltonian. In the tested hardware profiles, the resource-aware family improves the total-error budget and reduces the modeled $T$-gate count by $51.9\%$--$56.7\%$ relative to the standard analytical polynomial obtained from an error-function approximation.