About this map
Sections
What this is
Quantum algorithms are not written from scratch. They are assembled from a small number of reusable steps, and almost every published method is a different route through the same handful of them.
This is a map of those routes. Circles are the things an algorithm can be holding. Lines are the steps that carry you from one to the next. A method is a path across.
Nothing here is generated. Every line was read out of a paper and checked against it.
How to read it
- Something you can hold — a state, a matrix, a circuit, an answer.
- The same, in the middle of a step you have opened.
- A step. Someone has published a way through it.
- A step whose way through has not been pinned to one method.
- A step nothing published fills yet.
- A step you have opened. What is drawn inside it is how it was done.
- There is a record in the repository for this one.
How to move around
- Two fingers move the map. Pinch to zoom, or hold ctrl and scroll.
- Click a step to open it in place — everything else stays where it is.
- Click a name to read the full record without leaving the map.
- Arrow keys move, plus and minus zoom, zero puts it back.
What a line is claiming
A solid line means a paper puts those two steps together and we have the citation. A long-dashed line means the route is recorded but no single method has been named for that step. A short-dashed line means nothing published fills it — the step is real, the way through is not written yet.
A count after a step's name — ×T/h, ×O(κ) — means the route walks that step that many times rather than once. It is the source's own symbol, and the card says what it stands for and what one turn costs. A step with no count is a step no source we read said is repeated, which is not the same as one taken once.
A line drawn nested under another, on the soft shaded band behind it, is a narrower version of the line above it: the same construction, re-analysed or re-tuned, filling the same step. It is why two lines can draw the identical interior and still be two entries. Lines outside the band are alternatives to their neighbours, not versions of them.
The map does not hide the gaps. An empty step is drawn as an empty step.
What is not here yet
The map covers the algorithm literature. The repository covers circuits and primitives. They overlap less than you would expect, and where a method has no record we say so on its page rather than leaving the space blank.
Where something named here does have a record, its name links straight to it.
Method
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.
Open the full recordFills the slot: Quantum linear solve
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.
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 .
Linear system Ax = b → Solution as a statecombine Chebyshev walks by LCU
is applied as a linear combination of unitaries: with and , and with , the operator sends to , so the all-zeros branch carries . The building blocks are the Chebyshev polynomials , implemented by steps of the sparse-access quantum walk, so the entry oracle is used directly and neither nor phase estimation appears anywhere in the construction. approximation: A combination that is -close to on the spectrum yields a state -close to , provided there — Corollary 10, applied to on . assumption: is Hermitian and -sparse with and known condition number , reached through the entry oracle of Problem 1.
approximationassumption
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.
- 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
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
# HamiltoniansChilds, Kothari and Somma (Theorem 4): queries to and uses of , where is the sparsity, the condition number and the state-vector error.
None found yet.
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.
Chebyshev-series linear combination of unitaries (section 4)
- Quantum algorithm for systems of linear equations with exponentially improved dependence on precision
Andrew M. Childs, Robin Kothari, Rolando D. Somma · 2015
About
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.
Methods
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.
Data
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.
Code
None found yet.
Results
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.
- Quantum algorithm for systems of linear equations with exponentially improved dependence on precision
Fourier-series linear combination of unitaries (section 3)
- Quantum algorithm for systems of linear equations with exponentially improved dependence on precision
Andrew M. Childs, Robin Kothari, Rolando D. Somma · 2015
About
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".
Methods
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 .
Data
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.
Code
None found yet.
Results
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.
- Quantum algorithm for systems of linear equations with exponentially improved dependence on precision
Sparse-access quantum walk realising the Chebyshev polynomials (section 4.1)
- Quantum algorithm for systems of linear equations with exponentially improved dependence on precision
Andrew M. Childs, Robin Kothari, Rolando D. Somma · 2015
About
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.
Methods
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 .
Data
None found yet.
Code
None found yet.
Results
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.
- Quantum algorithm for systems of linear equations with exponentially improved dependence on precision
None found yet.
References
- Quantum algorithm for systems of linear equations with exponentially improved dependence on precision
Andrew M. Childs, Robin Kothari, Rolando D. Somma · 2015
Where the routes meet
11 problems nothing else needs — the places a reader arrives. Open a line to see what is recorded inside it, or click its name to go there.
13 lines have something recorded inside that you have not opened.
Of the routes that have been taken apart, 15 are built entirely from named slots, 15 hand off part of the work and finish the rest themselves, and 20 are one undivided act. None of the three is a defect; they are different things to reuse.
Every line on this figure, in words
The lines on this figure
Solve a nonlinear ODE dy/dt = F(y)
- Embed a nonlinear system into a linear one — opens into 6 · a way across — click it to open it here
- Solve a linear ODE du/dt = A(t)u + b(t) — opens into 9 · a way across — click it to open it here
- Choose a time discretization or propagator approximation → Quantum linear solve — open
- Choose a time discretization or propagator approximation — opens into 6 · a way across — click it to open it here
- Quantum linear solve — opens into 5 · a way across — click it to open it here
- Simulate Hamiltonian evolution → Estimate an observable — open
- Simulate Hamiltonian evolution — opens into 3 · a way across — click it to open it here
- Estimate an observable — opens into 4 · a way across — click it to open it here
Estimate an excited-state energy
- Variational quantum deflation — opens into 3 · a way across — click it to open it here
- Subspace-search variational eigensolver — opens into 3 · a way across — click it to open it here
- Quantum subspace expansion
- Quantum equation of motion
- Folded-spectrum variational eigensolver — opens into 3 · a way across — click it to open it here
- Penalty-constrained variational eigensolver — opens into 3 · a way across — click it to open it here
- Multistate contracted variational eigensolver — opens into 3 · a way across — click it to open it here
Every step you can open
1 of these have an object recorded in the middle; the rest open into the methods that fill them.
- Solve a nonlinear ODE dy/dt = F(y)
- Replace a spatial domain with a finite grid
- Discretize a PDE into one linear system
- Embed a nonlinear system into a linear one
- Solve a linear ODE du/dt = A(t)u + b(t)
- Recast a non-Hermitian generator as Hamiltonian evolution
- Choose a time discretization or propagator approximation
- Quantum linear solve
- Matrix function
- QSP phase factors
- Polynomial approximation
- Block-encode a matrix
- Prepare an input state
- Amplify a success branch
- Simulate Hamiltonian evolution
- Estimate an observable
- Compile a circuit to a specific device
- Satisfy the hardware connectivity constraint
- Approximate a continuous rotation in a discrete gate set
- Recover a noiseless expectation value by post-processing
- Build logical qubits at a target logical error rate
- Estimate a Hamiltonian's ground-state energy
- Choose a parameterised trial state
- Minimise the objective over the parameters
- Estimate an excited-state energy
- Measure what the machine can actually do
- Recover the period of a periodic function
- Estimate the eigenphase of a unitary
- Find the item a check accepts
- Walk a graph to the vertex you want
- Search a cost Hamiltonian for the assignment it minimises
What is on this map, counted
What is here, counted
147 nodes — 31 slots and 116 methods.
76 of the 147 link to a record in the Atlas, between them naming 89 records. The rest name papers and nothing else: this graph describes work the catalogue has not got yet, and the nodes with no record are the list of what a corpus pass has to go and read.
0 slots have no method recorded, and 32 methods have not been taken apart. Both are shown as what they are rather than left blank.
Every claim here rests on a source. This graph cites 140 papers; they and the 172 the Atlas cites alone are registered in one place, with what each reports and everywhere it is cited from. Papers