Quantum Data Loading for Carleman Linearized Systems: Application to the Lattice-Boltzmann Equation
Nonlinear ordinary and partial differential equations are ubiquitous in science and engineering, yet finding their solutions is often computationally intractable for classical hardware. To determine if quantum computers can offer a practical advantage, one critical challenge that must be solved is determining how to efficiently load exponentially sized matrices onto quantum hardware. In this article, we introduce an alternative linear combination of unitaries (LCU) strategy which relies on an intermediate linear combination of non-unitaries (LCNU) and a systematic embedding procedure. One advantage of this LCU strategy is that it maintains the exact number of terms as in the LCNU. Therefore, this approach offers a data loading framework for matrices that lack an efficient decomposition using the standard LCU alone. Using this approach, we construct a generalized LCNU framework for any Carleman linearized autonomous dynamical system having a polynomial nonlinearity. To demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach, we construct an LCNU for the 3D Carleman linearized lattice Boltzmann equation (LBE). Here, we find that the number of terms in the decomposition scales like $N_s\sim\mathcal{O}(\alpha^2Q^2)$, where $\alpha$ is the Carleman truncation order and $Q$ is the number of discrete velocities. Importantly, $N_s$ is independent of the number of spatial and temporal discretization points. We then perform a resource estimation of our LCNU's T gate cost when combined with the (1) PREP and SELECT block encoding oracles, and (2) variational quantum linear solver. In the former, the T cost scales like $\mathcal{O}(\alpha^3Q^2(\log_2n)^2)$, where $n$ is the total number of spatial grid points. The latter requires exactly $N_s^2(\log_2 (2n_tn^\alpha)+1)$ circuits per iteration for $n_t$ time steps, with a worst case T gate cost of $\mathcal{O}(\alpha (\log_2Qn)^2)$ among them.