Quantum circuit simulation with high-order optical tensor processing
Abstract
Classical simulation is essential for developing and testing quantum circuits, but the exponential growth of Hilbert space challenges conventional digital processors. Here, we introduce a classical optical quantum simulation architecture that treats gates and batches of input states as independent tensor dimensions rather than separate simulation instances, while mapping eligible tensor network contractions onto the same processor. Using co-designed multidimensional encoding and readout across spatial and wavelength degrees of freedom, we experimentally realize high-order tensor-matrix multiplication in a single propagation and process all computational-basis inputs for each 4-qubit gate. Using a physics-based optical propagation model, we further numerically evaluate the architecture for the Deutsch algorithm and for the tensor network of all 128 target instances of a 7-qubit Grover algorithm. These results establish a unified framework for gate-state batch and tensor network simulation, providing a route to exploit optical concurrency across quantum simulation tasks.
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BibTeX
@misc{zhang2026quantum,
title = {{Quantum circuit simulation with high-order optical tensor processing}},
author = {Yufeng Zhang and Xuhan Guo and Zixuan Ning and Zhiliang Yuan and Yikai Su and Kaizhi Wang and Sergei Turitsyn and Zhipei Sun},
howpublished = {arXiv},
year = {2026},
month = oct,
doi = {10.48550/arxiv.2610.36172},
eprint = {2610.36172},
archivePrefix = {arXiv},
url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.36172},
note = {CC BY-NC-ND 4.0},
}
RIS
TY - UNPB
TI - Quantum circuit simulation with high-order optical tensor processing
AU - Yufeng Zhang
AU - Xuhan Guo
AU - Zixuan Ning
AU - Zhiliang Yuan
AU - Yikai Su
AU - Kaizhi Wang
AU - Sergei Turitsyn
AU - Zhipei Sun
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/10/26
PB - arXiv
DO - 10.48550/arxiv.2610.36172
UR - https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.36172
AB - Classical simulation is essential for developing and testing quantum circuits, but the exponential growth of Hilbert space challenges conventional digital processors. Here, we introduce a classical optical quantum simulation architecture that treats gates and batches of input states as independent tensor dimensions rather than separate simulation instances, while mapping eligible tensor network contractions onto the same processor. Using co-designed multidimensional encoding and readout across spatial and wavelength degrees of freedom, we experimentally realize high-order tensor-matrix multiplication in a single propagation and process all computational-basis inputs for each 4-qubit gate. Using a physics-based optical propagation model, we further numerically evaluate the architecture for the Deutsch algorithm and for the tensor network of all 128 target instances of a 7-qubit Grover algorithm. These results establish a unified framework for gate-state batch and tensor network simulation, providing a route to exploit optical concurrency across quantum simulation tasks.
ER -