VQLS Read the Fine Print

Practical Challenges for Solving the Poisson Equation by Means of a Variational Quantum Linear Solver

Master thesis (2022)

Authors

T.R. Verduyn Aerospace Engineering

Contributors

M.I. Gerritsma Aerodynamics - Aerospace Engineering (supervisor 1)
Faculty
Aerospace Engineering
Copyright: © 2022 Thomas Verduyn
More Info
expand_more

Published Date

05-12-2022

Language

English

Reuse Rights

Other than for strictly personal use, it is not permitted to download, forward or distribute the text or part of it, without the consent of the author(s) and/or copyright holder(s), unless the work is under an open content license such as Creative Commons.

Faculty

Aerospace Engineering

Abstract

The need of computational power for engineering applications has been ever increasing and with classical computers approaching their physical limits, new ways of improvement have to be investigated. One of the promising solutions is quantum computing. Most engineering problems require solving a system of linear equations of higher dimensions and the Variational Quantum Linear Solver (VQLS) algorithm seems like a promising near term solution. This algorithm evaluates a cost function on a quantum machine and uses a classical optimizer to minimize this cost function. The minimum of this cost function corresponds to the solution of the linear system. This work aims at finding what the practical limitations are when solving the Poisson equation by means of VQLS. Results showed that problems small in size can be solved, however for larger problems obtaining the solution becomes effectively impossible due to barren plateaus, which are flat spots in the cost function landscape.