Error convergence of quantum linear system solvers

Abstract

We analyze the performance of the Harrow-Hassidim-Lloyd algorithm (HHL algorithm) for solving linear problems and of a variant of this algorithm (HHL variant) commonly encountered in literature. This variant relieves the algorithm of preparing an entangled initial state of an auxiliary register. We prove that the computational error of the variant algorithm does not always converge to zero when the number of qubits is increased, unlike the original HHL algorithm. Both algorithms rely upon two fundamental quantum algorithms, the quantum phase estimation and the amplitude amplification. In particular, the error of the HHL variant oscillates due to the presence of undesired phases in the amplitude to be amplified, while these oscillations are suppressed in the original HHL algorithm. Then, we propose a modification of the HHL variant, by amplifying an amplitude of the state vector that does not exhibit the above destructive interference. We also study the complexity of these algorithms in the light of recent results on simulation of unitaries used in the quantum phase estimation step, and show that the modified algorithm has smaller error and lower complexity than the HHL variant. We supported our findings with numerical simulations.