Quantum preconditioning method for finite difference discretizations of the Poisson equation via Schrödingerization

Abstract

We present a quantum preconditioning framework for solving linear systems arising from a finite difference discretization of the Poisson equation. It is based on the combination of the Schrödingerization technique \cite{JLY22b,JLYPRL24} and the BPX multilevel preconditioner in order to achieve near-optimal complexity. The Schrödingerization technique transforms linear partial and ordinary differential equations into Schrödinger-type systems with unitary evolution in one higher dimension, making them suitable for quantum simulation. A key contribution is a structure-aware construction of the block-encoding for the symmetrically preconditioned matrix $A_S=S^{\top }AS$, where $A$ is the stiffness matrix and $S$ encodes the BPX preconditioner in factored form. By establishing a novel commuting identity, we avoid the unfavorable normalization scaling that would otherwise arise from naive multiplication of block-encodings. This yields an exact block-encoding of $A_S$ with normalization $\mathcal{O}(d^2(L+1))$, where $d$ is the spatial dimension and $L$ is the number of levels. Combined with the Schrödingerization-based Hamiltonian simulation, the overall quantum algorithm achieves a query complexity of $\mathcal{O}(\mathrm{poly}(d){\epsilon }^{-1}\mathrm{polylog}({\epsilon }^{-1}))$ for estimating linear functionals of the solution to a given tolerance $\epsilon$.