Exponential Reduction of Mesh Dependence in Quantum Estimation of Parabolic PDE Observables

Abstract

Can a quantum PDE algorithm avoid the polynomial cost of resolving a fine spatial mesh? For standard fixed-order discretizations, direct classical methods require work polynomial in $h^{-1}$, or equivalently in the number of spatial degrees of freedom $N_h=\Theta(h^{-d})$. Direct quantum implementations of a parabolic semigroup still have coherent complexity $\widetilde{\mathcal O}(\sqrt{T}/h)$, and gradient-dependent observables such as heat flux and dissipation introduce additional mesh dependence. Decay of the solution norm will further suppress the postselection probability for preparing a normalized final state. We develop a multilevel quantum algorithm that estimates linear and quadratic observables $directly$ and places the fine--coarse cancellation inside the circuit before measurement. A contour-based LCU reconstructs each target-time correction from a coherent family of shifted resolvent differences. Rather than block encoding the fine and coarse inverses separately, we encode their difference through a shifted Ritz--Schur factorization, exposing its $\mathcal O(h_\ell^2)$ two-grid normalization. For Fourier hierarchies, the corresponding SELECT oracle consists of a quantum Fourier or sine transform, a spectral-band selector, and reversible diagonal arithmetic. We also give a non-Fourier realization based on energy-orthogonal dyadic midpoint details in one dimension, together with structured tensor-product extensions under fixed-rank coefficient and access assumptions. For readouts with derivative order $0\le\chi\le2$, optimized amplitude estimation removes $all$ polynomial dependence on the finest mesh size. Under the stated access assumptions, both linear and quadratic observables can be estimated with complexity $\widetilde{\mathcal O}(1+(T\epsilon)^{-1})$, with only polylogarithmic dependence on $h^{-1}$.