MethodLayer 1
Chebyshev LCU inversion
Expand an approximation of in Chebyshev polynomials and implement that expansion directly through the quantum walk associated with a sparse , rather than through Hamiltonian simulation. Phase estimation is never used, which is what removes the bottleneck.
An access model for — sparse row/column entry oracles, or a block-encoding; a unitary preparing ; a known upper bound on the condition number; the normalisation ; and a target state error .
A flagged state -close in to . It does not return , any entry of , or any classical functional of — those cost extra and are decided a layer above.
Same contract as the slot it fills.
This one, drawn
From Linear system Ax = b to Solution as a state
A circle is an object you are holding. This method is drawn heavier, opened into its own steps; the other lines between the same two ends are the alternatives recorded for the same slot. Circles are named on hover, and each one is a link.
3 lines here have ways through that this figure does not open. The map opens them in place. See it on the map
What it fills
- Quantum linear solve
Given access to a matrix and a unitary that prepares , produce a flagged quantum state that is -close in to the normalised . The deliverable is a state, not a classical vector.
When it applies
Applies to sparse matrices only: it uses the entry oracle directly. The normalisation , a known and -time preparation of are assumed as elsewhere in this family. Childs, Kothari and Somma state that their Fourier route and this Chebyshev route are incomparable — the Fourier approach is more general and slightly better in the sparsity , the Chebyshev approach is more efficient in and but applies only to sparse Hamiltonians.
Requires
These do not move the route along. The method needs each of them alongside its own work, and the cost of getting them is part of what the method costs.
- Prepare an input state
Map to a state whose amplitudes are proportional to a specified vector , to within . The cost is set by which description of you hold, not by the algorithm that consumes it.
This route consumes its right-hand side as a procedure with , where , and Theorem 4 charges uses of it. assumption: prepares in time — part of Problem 1's definition of the QLSP, not something the algorithm establishes. assumption: Multiple copies of can be created, which is the authors' stated reason the construction needs no oblivious amplitude amplification — a tool that would not work anyway when is far from unitary.
assumption
- Matrix function
Given a block-encoding of and a target function bounded on , produce a circuit whose designated block is an -approximation of applied to the singular values (or eigenvalues) of .
The object to be applied is for , and is first tamed to , which is bounded at the origin. approximation: is -close to on for any integer (Lemma 17). Being a polynomial of degree , is then represented exactly by odd Chebyshev polynomials , , with coefficients (Lemma 18). approximation: The series is truncated at ; each discarded bracket is the probability of more than heads in fair flips and is bounded by , so the surviving degree is (Lemma 19). Every surviving term is applied by powers of the quantum walk , for which , at queries to . assumption: because is -sparse with , and the expansion need only be correct on because the eigenvalues of are known to lie in .
approximationassumption
- Amplify a success branch
Take a routine whose output lands in the wanted subspace only with probability , and raise that probability to near 1 using quadratically fewer repetitions than restarting the routine would need.
Measuring the flag register of returns only with probability , so the branch is amplified rather than merely retried. Amplitude amplification produces it after uses of and in expectation, which is here because on forces ; with that is uses of . assumption: A reflection about the starting state is available; it is built as from two uses of , one performed in reverse. assumption: The expected cost needs no estimate of , but a worst-case guarantee needs an upper bound on the success probability — is known, so running ten times the expected running time gives the worst case.
assumption
Example
Childs, Kothari and Somma's paper is a complexity result and carries no numerical section; a full-text read (2026-08-12) confirmed it, and the register row moved to a full-text basis with that reading. The numerics on the neighbouring `eigenstate-filtering-inversion` record are Lin and Tong's and test a different construction.
given a sparse A only -- the entry oracle P_A is used directly -- with
the normalisation ||A|| = 1, kappa known, and |b> preparable in
poly(log N) time, as elsewhere in this family
prepare |b>
expand an approximation of 1/x in Chebyshev polynomials
# the record states no truncation degree for that expansion
implement that expansion directly through the quantum walk associated
with the sparse A
# rather than through Hamiltonian simulation
# phase estimation is never used, which is what removes the
# poly(1/epsilon) bottleneck
amplify
# Theorem 4: O(d kappa^2 log^2(d kappa/epsilon)) queries to P_A and
# O(kappa log(d kappa/epsilon)) uses of P_B, where d is the sparsity,
# kappa the condition number and epsilon the state-vector error
# that kappa^2 is the pre-amplification figure. The same paper's Theorem
# 5 brings the kappa-dependence down to near-linear, but it does so by
# reintroducing a low-precision (gapped) phase estimation to bucket the
# spectrum, and it applies to either the Fourier or the Chebyshev route.
# Describing that near-linear result as phase-estimation-free is
# incorrect, which is why it is not the route written above.
# the same authors' Fourier route is not displaced by this one: they
# state that the two are incomparable -- the Fourier approach is more
# general and slightly better in the sparsity d, the Chebyshev approach
# is more efficient in kappa and epsilon but applies only to sparse
# HamiltoniansCost, as the source states it
Childs, Kothari and Somma (Theorem 4): queries to and uses of , where is the sparsity, the condition number and the state-vector error.
Implementations
Chebyshev-series linear combination of unitaries (section 4)
The paper's second of two approaches, and the one this record is named for: it "uses a Chebyshev expansion to implement without appealing directly to Hamiltonian simulation", using the oracle for the entries of directly and achieving better dependence on than the first. The problem it is built for is Problem 1, the QLSP: given an Hermitian with known condition number , and at most nonzero entries in any row or column, given a procedure computing the entries of and a procedure preparing in time , output a state with , succeeding with probability at least and with a flag indicating success.
The route is an instance of the paper's own linear-combination-of-unitaries framework (section 2): for with , and with , the operator satisfies (Lemmas 6 and 7), and Corollary 10 converts a combination that is -close on the spectrum into a state -close to . The building blocks are for . The function is tamed first: is -close to on for any integer , because on that domain the numerator differs most from at , where (Lemma 17). Being a polynomial of degree , is then represented exactly rather than approximately by odd Chebyshev polynomials, , proved by substituting and checking that the coefficients of agree on both sides for every (Lemma 18). The series is then truncated at : each bracket is the probability of seeing more than heads on flipping fair coins, the Chernoff bound puts it below , and since on the discarded tail is at most (Lemma 19). The surviving degree is . What is implemented is rather than itself, since gives . Its coefficient sum is , because every bracket is a probability and so is at most , and it is this that the amplitude amplification of Corollary 10 is charged against.
No dataset. The inputs are the two black-box procedures of Problem 1. performs , where computes the row index of the th nonzero entry of the th column, and also , with the entries of assumed representable exactly, or to sufficiently high precision that any error can be neglected. prepares in time . The in-place form of the first map is an assumption the paper flags rather than hides: it holds when both and its reverse are efficiently computable, costs an extra factor of by binary search when returns the nonzero entries in ascending order, and costs a further using Grover's algorithm in the worst case where the entries are unordered. No particular matrix and no particular vector is named anywhere.
The construction is carried as far as counted complexity and no further. Theorem 4 gives queries to — the product of the amplification rounds and the highest Chebyshev order used — together with uses of and gate complexity , so the gate cost exceeds the query cost only by the factor that one walk step carries; creates a state in a space of dimension with two-qubit gates, which is less than the cost of and is neglected. There is no run. The paper reports no numerical experiment, names no hardware and no simulator, and contains no figure and no table; the one place it computes anything numerically is a remark inside the other route's error analysis, recorded under the Fourier entry. A reader sent to this paper looking for a worked instance of this algorithm will not find one.
Fourier-series linear combination of unitaries (section 3)
The paper's first approach, and it is presented as a separate algorithm rather than a variant of the second. It uses the same section-2 framework but takes as its building blocks instead of , so Hamiltonian simulation is used as a black box; for sparse the paper substitutes the method of Berry, Childs and Kothari. The two routes are stated to be incomparable: "The Fourier approach is more general, applying whenever the Hamiltonian can be efficiently simulated (even if it is not necessarily sparse), and has slightly better dependence on . The Chebyshev approach is more efficient in its dependence on and , but applies only to sparse Hamiltonians." It is recorded here because it is the sibling this method is defined against, and because the paper reports that it has already been picked up: an algorithm for estimating hitting times of Markov chains "uses the framework laid out in this paper (in Section 2) and closely follows our first approach, which we call the Fourier approach".
The same Lemma 7 and Corollary 10, with the taken to be . The representation starts from for , which holds for any odd with ; the paper chooses so that both the function and its Fourier transform decay rapidly, and writes . The double integral is cut off at and , using and a Gaussian tail bound from Abramowitz and Stegun, and then discretised into with , , , , and , which is -close to on (Lemma 11). The discretisation error can be driven arbitrarily low for free, because the query complexity that comes out of Corollary 10 does not depend on the number of terms in the linear combination. The coefficient sum is , the longest evolution time appearing is , and since simulation is invoked times each invocation must run to error . The controlled operation is built as powers of the single unitary , the largest being with , so only the repeated squarings are ever formed. is Hadamard gates for the uniform superposition over and further gates for the superposition over , and its cost is dominated by that of . One wrinkle is recorded rather than passed over: is so short an evolution time that the quoted simulation gate bound does not explicitly cover it, so the paper patches the bound by replacing its leading with and treating every logarithm as the maximum of its original expression and .
No dataset. The same Problem 1 oracles, but reached differently: this route needs only the ability to implement , so enters through whichever Hamiltonian simulation algorithm is chosen, and the query figures quoted are those of the sparse-access method of Berry, Childs and Kothari. No matrix and no right-hand side is instantiated.
Counted only, again. Theorem 3 gives uses of a Hamiltonian simulation algorithm approximating for with precision ; with the best known such algorithm that is queries to , uses of , and gate complexity . This entry is also where the paper's only computed quantity lives, and it is worth naming precisely so that nobody mistakes it for a run. In the error analysis of section 3.1 the bound for all is asserted "as is easily verified by plotting the left-hand side". That is a plot of a scalar function of one real variable, used to close one inequality in a proof. It fixes no matrix, no dimension , no sparsity , no condition number and no error target, it produces no state and no measured quantity, and it is not a run of this algorithm or of the Chebyshev one.
Sparse-access quantum walk realising the Chebyshev polynomials (section 4.1)
The primitive the Chebyshev route is built on, and not this paper's invention — the walk "has previously been applied to Hamiltonian simulation" and the paper says so. What section 4.1 supplies is the property the expansion consumes: powers of the walk realise Chebyshev polynomials of in a block of a unitary, which is exactly the form Corollary 10 requires of its . It is recorded separately because it is the only way the Chebyshev route touches at all, so the route's claim to avoid Hamiltonian simulation and phase estimation stands or falls with it.
For a -sparse Hamiltonian with , define for each the state in ; the square root is ambiguous when is complex and the results hold for any consistent choice of it. The oracle is assumed to return exactly nonzero entries for a given , which is without loss of generality because it can be modified to treat some zero entries as nonzero — on those values of it returns the value , and they still contribute through the term. With the isometry and the swap on , the walk operator is , implementable with queries to . From and , Lemma 15 shows that within the invariant subspace of an eigenvector of with , has the block form with on the diagonal and off it, while when . Lemma 16 raises that block to the th power by induction on the identities and , giving on the diagonal and off it, with the Chebyshev polynomial of the second kind. Hence , and since the eigenvectors of span and the pairs are invariant, for every . Given a unitary circuit implementing the isometry, that is, mapping to with , applying it, then , then its inverse implements with for .
Section 4.1 ends at a query count and section 4.3 at a gate count. Because and each cost queries to , the map producing costs queries, which is what makes the Chebyshev route's query complexity the product of its amplification rounds and its highest surviving degree. A single step of the walk can be performed up to error with gate complexity . Nothing here is executed: the walk is specified, counted and proved correct, and no instance of , no simulator and no device appears.
Where the claim is contested
The here is the pre-amplification figure. The same paper's Theorem 5 brings the -dependence down to near-linear, but it does so by reintroducing a low-precision ('gapped') phase estimation to bucket the spectrum, and it applies to either the Fourier or the Chebyshev route. Describing that near-linear result as phase-estimation-free is incorrect.
What it needs
Every step this method names is listed under Requires above. It walks its own span in one hop and calls out to the rest — that is a fact about the recorded route, not a claim that the span is simple.
Slots it makes unnecessary
These do not fill the slot. They replace the span it belongs to, so this layer is not on their path at all.
- Simulate Hamiltonian evolution
Implement to error given some access model for . It is an application in its own right and also the engine inside phase estimation and several linear-system solvers.
Other ways to fill the same slot
Different approaches
- HHL: eigenvalue inversion by phase estimation
Prepare , run phase estimation against to write eigenvalue estimates into an ancilla register, apply a controlled rotation with amplitude proportional to , uncompute the estimation and post-select on the rotation ancilla. The success amplitude is about , so the procedure is amplified times.
- QSVT matrix inversion
Block-encode , apply the quantum singular value transformation with an odd polynomial approximating a scaled away from the origin, then amplify. Because it acts on singular values, need not be Hermitian or sparse — only block-encodable.
- Discrete adiabatic inversion
Encode the solution as the null eigenstate of a Hamiltonian path built from and , follow that path with a sequence of qubitization walk operators to fixed precision, then finish with an eigenstate filter implemented as a linear combination of walk operators rather than by quantum signal processing. Costa and co-authors prove an adiabatic theorem for intrinsically discrete-time evolutions, which removes the residual that continuous adiabatic treatments carried.
- Eigenstate filtering inversion
Construct the minimax-optimal polynomial that is 1 at a target eigenvalue and uniformly small outside a spectral gap, and apply it through quantum signal processing. For a linear system is the null eigenstate of a Hamiltonian built from and , so one application of the filter solves it once a starting state with non-trivial overlap is supplied.
In the Atlas
No record in the Atlas covers this yet. The catalogue is circuits and primitives; this part of the literature is not in it.