Quantum Method for Finite Element Simulation of Electromagnetic Problems

Quantum simulation of electromagnetic (EM) structures is still in its infancy. In this paper, we investigate the possibility of applying quantum computing to solve the finite element equations for EM problems. Specifically, we propose to leverage a milestone in quantum computing, i.e., the Harrow/Hassidim/Lloyd (HHL) algorithm, to solve the finite element equations in the EM domain. To do this, we first present a systematic method to reformulate the finite element equations into quantum computation format and apply the HHL algorithm to solve the new equations. Taking advantage of the special properties of finite element matrices in EM problems, we then devise a stepwise algorithm to efficiently determine the suitable values for the hyperparameters of HHL. The proposed method can in theory solve the EM finite element equations in logarithmic time relative to the size of the finite element matrix. This is exponentially faster than that achievable by classical computation as the matrix size increases. A two-dimensional EM example is used to illustrate how the proposed method can be used to find the solutions to EM problems through quantum computation.