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. Designing quantum algorithms for time-dependent Hamiltonian is generally much more complicated than time-independent Hamiltonian problems, due to the challenge in handling the time-ordering; moreover, almost all existing such algorithms are developed for qubit-based quantum devices. Here we propose an alternative formalism based on Sambe-Howland’s clock 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 Schrödingerisation, 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.