Accelerating Stochastic Dynamics Simulation with Continuous-time Quantum Walks

Stochastic diffusion is a general phenomenon observed in various national and engineering systems. It is typically modeled by either stochastic differential equation (SDE) or Fokker-Planck equation (FPE), which are equivalent approaches. Path integral is an accurate and effective method to solve FPEs. Yet, computational efficiency is the common challenge for path integral and other numerical methods, include time and space complexities. Previously, one-dimensional continuous-time quantum walk was used to simulate diffusion. By combining quantum diffusion and random diffusion, the new approach can accelerate the simulation with longer time steps than those in path integral. It was demonstrated that simulation can be dozens or even hundreds of times faster. In this paper, a new generic quantum operator is proposed to simulate drift-diffusion processes in high-dimensional space, which combines quantum walks on graphs with traditional path integral approaches. Probability amplitudes are computed efficiently by spectral analysis. The efficiency of the new method is demonstrated with stochastic resonance problems.