Variational Quantum algorithm for Poisson equation

Abstract: The Poisson equation has wide applications in many areas of science and engineering. Although there are some quantum algorithms that can efficiently solve the Poisson equation, they generally require a fault-tolerant quantum computer which is beyond the current technology. In this paper, we propose a Variational Quantum Algorithm (VQA) to solve the Poisson equation, which can be executed on Noise Intermediate-Scale Quantum (NISQ) devices. In detail, we first adopt the finite difference method to transform the Poisson equation into a linear system. Then, according to the special structure of the linear system, we find an explicit tensor product decomposition, with only $2\log n+1$ items, of its coefficient matrix under a specific set of simple operators, where $n$ is the dimension of the coefficient matrix. This implies that the proposed VQA only needs $O(\log n)$ measurements, which dramatically reduce quantum resources. Additionally, we perform quantum Bell measurements to efficiently evaluate the expectation values of simple operators. Numerical experiments demonstrate that our algorithm can effectively solve the Poisson equation.