Efficient quantum amplitude encoding of polynomial functions
Loading functions into quantum computers represents an essential step in several quantum algorithms, such as quantum partial differential equation solvers. Therefore, the inefficiency of this process leads to a major bottleneck for the application of these algorithms. Here, we present and compare two efficient methods for the amplitude encoding of real polynomial functions on $n$ qubits. This case holds special relevance, as any continuous function on a closed interval can be uniformly approximated with arbitrary precision by a polynomial function. The first approach relies on the matrix product state representation. We study and benchmark the approximations of the target state when the bond dimension is assumed to be small. The second algorithm combines two subroutines. Initially we encode the linear function into the quantum registers with a shallow sequence of multi-controlled gates that loads the linear function's Hadamard-Walsh series, exploring how truncating the Hadamard-Walsh series of the linear function affects the final fidelity. Applying the inverse discrete Hadamard-Walsh transform transforms the series coefficients into an amplitude encoding of the linear function. Then, we use this construction as a building block to achieve a block encoding of the amplitudes corresponding to the linear function on $k_0$ qubits and apply the quantum singular value transformation that implements a polynomial transformation to the block encoding of the amplitudes. This unitary together with the Amplitude Amplification algorithm will enable us to prepare the quantum state that encodes the polynomial function on $k_0$ qubits. Finally we pad $n-k_0$ qubits to generate an approximated encoding of the polynomial on $n$ qubits, analyzing the error depending on $k_0$. In this regard, our methodology proposes a method to improve the state-of-the-art complexity by introducing controllable errors.