Quantum simulation for time-dependent Hamiltonians -- with applications to non-autonomous ordinary and partial differential equations

Abstract: Non-autonomous dynamical systems appear in a very wide range of interesting applications, both in classical and quantum dynamics, where in the latter case it corresponds to having a time-dependent Hamiltonian. However, the quantum simulation of these systems often needs to appeal to rather complicated procedures involving the Dyson series, considerations of time-ordering, requirement of time steps to be discrete and/or requiring multiple measurements and postselection. These procedures are generally much more complicated than the quantum simulation of time-independent Hamiltonians. Here we propose an alternative formalism that turns any non-autonomous unitary dynamical system into an autonomous unitary system, i.e., quantum system with a time-independent Hamiltonian, in one higher dimension, while keeping time continuous. This makes the simulation with time-dependent Hamiltonians not much more difficult than that of time-independent Hamiltonians, and can also be framed in terms of an analogue quantum system evolving continuously in time. We show how our new quantum protocol for time-dependent Hamiltonians can be performed in a resource-efficient way and without measurements, and can be made possible on either continuous-variable, qubit or hybrid systems. Combined with a technique called Schrodingerisation, this dilation technique can be applied to the quantum simulation of any linear ODEs and PDEs, and nonlinear ODEs and certain nonlinear PDEs, with time-dependent coefficients.