Efficient phase-factor evaluation in quantum signal processing

Quantum signal processing (QSP) is a powerful quantum algorithm to exactly implement matrix polynomials on quantum computers. Asymptotic analysis of quantum algorithms based on QSP has shown that asymptotically optimal results can in principle be obtained for a range of tasks, such as Hamiltonian simulation and the quantum linear system problem. A further benefit of QSP is that it uses a minimal number of ancilla qubits, which facilitates its implementation on near-to-intermediate term quantum architectures. However, there is so far no classically stable algorithm allowing computation of the phase factors that are needed to build QSP circuits. Existing methods require the usage of variable precision arithmetic and can only be applied to polynomials of relatively low degree. We present here an optimization based method that can accurately compute the phase factors using standard double precision arithmetic operations. We demonstrate the performance of this approach with applications to Hamiltonian simulation, eigenvalue filtering, and the quantum linear system problems. Our numerical results show that the optimization algorithm can find phase factors to accurately approximate polynomials of degree larger than 10,000 with error below 10-12.