Quantum Computing for Industrial Electromagnetics: Applicability and Case Studies in Solving Maxwell's Equations

Abstract

Computational electromagnetics plays a central role in many industrial applications but often requires substantial computational resources, particularly when fine spatial discretizations are needed. While classical approaches remain the standard, quantum computing offers the potential to accelerate large-scale simulations by encoding them with a limited number of qubits. Here, we investigate the performance and resource scaling of the Harrow-Hassidim-Lloyd (HHL) and Quantum Singular Value Transformation (QSVT) algorithms for solving linear systems generated by the finite-difference time-domain (FDTD) method, a widely adopted numerical scheme for discretizing Maxwell's equations. We benchmark their performance across representative industrial use cases, including radar propagation, lens simulations, and beamforming processes. Our results demonstrate the validity of the approaches, achieving state infidelities smaller than $2\cdot 10^{-3}$ with success probabilities greater than $10^{-3}$, compatible with practical quantum state sampling. Overall, we observe that the QSVT method consistently delivers higher accuracy. We further observe that the condition number of the linear matrix, a key factor governing the performance of quantum solvers, saturates as the number of spatial lattice points increases. This implies that the spatial grid can be scaled to realistic industrial dimensions without increasing the HHL or QSVT circuit depth due to ill-conditioned matrices.