An end-to-end quantum algorithm for weakly nonlinear plasma physics with superquadratic speedup

Abstract

Nonlinear kinetic plasma simulation is high-dimensional and classically demanding, while quantum algorithms face different bottlenecks: embedding nonlinear dynamics into a linear computation, loading dense field-interaction data, and efficiently extracting information. We present an end-to-end quantum algorithm, with rigorous convergence guarantees, for a weakly nonlinear kinetic plasma model. The system describes a 3D electron-ion plasma with adiabatic electrons, kinetic ions, Debye screening, and Krook relaxation. After Fourier-Hermite truncation, the dynamics reduces to a high-dimensional quadratic ordinary differential equation. To tackle quantum bottlenecks we combine three key ingredients. First, we use a plasma free energy to identify a Lyapunov transform under which a Carleman linear embedding converges exponentially in the truncation order within a certified weakly nonlinear regime. Second, we develop a hierarchical block-encoding protocol for dense matrices, exploiting the spatial decay of the field to avoid polynomial overhead from sparse access encodings. Third, we introduce a subroutine for information extraction that exploits nonlinear components encoded in the full Carleman history state to improve the estimation of linear observables. We construct a quantum algorithm to estimate the spacetime-averaged kinetic energy using $\tilde{O}\left(N_F{N}_H^{1/2}\mathrm{polylog}\left(\frac{T}{\hat{I}}\mu \right)\frac{1}{\hat{I}}\mu \right)$ gates and $\tilde{O}\left(\log \left(N_F{N}_H^{1/2}T\right)\log \left(\frac{1}{\hat{I}}\mu \right)\right)$ qubits, where $N_F$ and $N_H$ are the Fourier and Hermite cutoffs. Relative to a Fourier-Hermite spectral solver, this yields exponential memory savings and superquadratic improvements in time. Together, these results establish a controlled nonlinear plasma benchmark for quantum simulation.

70 pages, 4 figures

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