6–11 Dec 2026
Stellenbosch University
Africa/Johannesburg timezone

Coherent-State Propagation: A Computational Framework for Simulating Bosonic Quantum Systems

Not scheduled
20m
Jan Mouton Learning Centre (Stellenbosch University)

Jan Mouton Learning Centre

Stellenbosch University

Poster

Speakers

Armando Angrisani NIKITA GUSEYNOV (Shanghai Jiao Tong University) Zoe Holmes

Description

We develop coherent-state propagation, a computational framework for simulating bosonic systems. We focus on bosonic circuits composed of displaced linear optics augmented by Kerr nonlinearities, a universal model of bosonic quantum computation that is also physically motivated by driven Bose-Hubbard dynamics. The method works in the Schrodinger picture, representing the evolving state as a sparse superposition of coherent states. We develop approximation strategies that keep the simulation cost tractable in physically relevant regimes, notably when the number of Kerr gates is small or the Kerr nonlinearities are weak, and prove rigorous guarantees for both observable estimation and sampling. In particular, bosonic circuits with logarithmically many Kerr gates admit quasi-polynomial-time classical simulation with exponentially small error in trace distance. We further identify a weak-nonlinearity regime in which the runtime is polynomial for arbitrarily small constant precision. We complement these results with numerical benchmarks on the Bose-Hubbard model with all-to-all connectivity.
Finally, we discuss applications to quantum machine learning, where coherent-state propagation extends the capabilities of classically trainable Bosonic Born Machines by incorporating controlled non-Gaussian nonlinearities.

Topic Encoding and processing of data in quantum systems
Additional Topic Tensor methods and quantum-inspired machine learning

Authors

Presentation materials