Designing a Hybrid Digital / Analog Quantum Physics Emulator as Open Hardware

Abstract: One of the most exciting quantum emulation [1] breakthroughs was the first analog signal-based emulation of a universal quantum computer [2]. This yielded a very interesting paper, but no practical use - even for theorists. The reason for this was that a signal duration of the approximate age of the universe (13.77 billion years) could accommodate only about 95 qubits. We propose a new scheme with the following properties: 1) a pair of oscillators or sinusioidal wave sources must be sufficient to emulate n superimposed states with the ability to be identifiably mixed or entangled, 2) the time required to perform a measurement of a state must not scale poorly with the complexity of the state, 3) a fixed set of hardware components must be sufficient to emulate a system of a significant number of qubits, and 4) at least as much must be knowable about an emulated quantum state as is expected to be measurable in a theoretical quantum computing system. We achieve a design whose time complexity scales favourably based on a new method of encoding quantum information into classical signals, but only anticipate the feasibility of encodings of up to 20 qubits with modern electrical hardware.