Complementary polynomials in quantum signal processing

Abstract

Quantum signal processing is a framework for implementing polynomial functions on quantum computers. To implement a given polynomial $P$, one must first construct a corresponding complementary polynomial $Q$. Existing approaches to this problem employ numerical methods that are not amenable to explicit error analysis. We present a new approach to complementary polynomials using complex analysis. Our main mathematical result is a contour integral representation for a canonical complementary polynomial. On the unit circle, this representation has a particularly simple and efficacious Fourier analytic interpretation, which we use to develop a Fast Fourier Transform-based algorithm for the efficient calculation of $Q$ in the monomial basis with explicit error guarantees. Numerical evidence that our algorithm outperforms the state-of-the-art optimization-based method for computing complementary polynomials is provided.