Quantum Domain Decomposition for Preconditioning the Finite Element Method
This work addresses the bottleneck of ill-conditioned matrices in quantum linear solvers for PDEs, offering a theoretical foundation for quantum domain decomposition preconditioners.
The authors prove the feasibility of applying quantum domain decomposition preconditioners to the finite element method, providing upper bounds for block-encoding parameters of the Poisson problem preconditioned by two-level Additive Schwarz. They deduce the complexity of the quantum linear solver and implement operators using the BPX preconditioner.
Even in cases where quantum linear solvers provide significant speedup compared to their classical counterparts, their performance depends on some of the same parameters. In particular, the condition number of the matrix which is to be inverted is a decisive parameter. A well known classical, and now quantum, remedy is to precondition the linear system $A x = b$ by premultiplying it by a matrix $H$ in such a way that the condition number of $HA$ is significantly smaller than the condition number of $A$. In this work, we focus on a family of preconditioners called domain decomposition. First, we prove that it is feasible to apply quantum domain decomposition. We provide upper bounds for the block-encoding parameters of the Poisson problem discretized by the finite element method and preconditioned by the two-level Additive Schwarz preconditioner (one of the most fundamental domain decomposition techniques). From these bounds, we deduce the complexity of the quantum linear system solver. Second, we focus on a particular choice of local solver within the domain decomposition preconditioner by applying recent work by [Deiml and Peterseim, \textit{Math. Comput.}, 2025] on the Bramble--Pasciak--Xu (BPX) preconditioner. Finally, we provide details on how the operators are implemented.