High-order quantum algorithm for solving linear differential equations

Linear differential equations are ubiquitous in science and engineering. Quantum computers can simulate quantum systems, which are described by a restricted type of linear differential equations. Here we extend quantum simulation algorithms to general inhomogeneous sparse linear differential equations, which describe many classical physical systems. We examine the use of high-order methods (where the error over a time step is a high power of the size of the time step) to improve the efficiency. These provide scaling close to Delta t(2) in the evolution time Delta t. As with other algorithms of this type, the solution is encoded in amplitudes of the quantum state, and it is possible to extract global features of the solution.