Solution of the Electric Field Integral Equation Using a Hybrid Quantum-Classical Scheme: Investigation of Accuracy and Efficiency

Conventional classical solvers are commonly used for solving matrix equation systems resulting from the discretization of SIEs in computational electromagnetics (CEM). However, the memory requirement would become a bottleneck for classical computing as the electromagentic problems become much larger. As an alternative, quantum computing has a natural "parallelization" advantage with much lower storage complexity due to the superposition and entanglement in quantum mechanics. Even though several quantum algorithms have been applied for the SIEs-based methods in the literature, the size of the matrix equation systems solvable using them is still limited. In this work, we use a hybrid quantum-classical scheme to solve the EFIE for analyzing electromagentic scattering from three-dimensional (3D) perfect electrically conducting objects with arbitrary shapes in CEM for the first time. Instead of directly solving the original EFIE matrix equation system using the quantum algorithms, the hybrid scheme first designs the preconditioned linear system and then uses a double-layer iterative strategy for its solution, where the external iteration layer builds subspace matrix equation systems with smaller dimension and the internal iteration layer solves the smaller systems using the quantum algorithms. Two representative quantum algorithms, HHL and VQLS, are considered in this work, which are executed on the quantum simulator and quantum computer platforms. We present the theoretical time complexity analysis of the hybrid quantum-classical scheme and perform numerical experiments to investigate the accuracy and efficiency of the hybrid scheme. The results show that the computational complexity of the hybrid VQLS-classical scheme is lower than the conventional fast solvers in classical computing, which indicates the hybrid scheme is more promising for analyzing large-scale electromagnetic problems.