Quantum-classical crossover in fault-tolerant quantum dynamics simulation

Abstract

While quantum computers promise to solve classically intractable problems, identifying the point at which fault-tolerant quantum computation outperforms the best classical algorithms for practical applications remains an outstanding challenge. Here we establish a concrete quantum-classical crossover for quantum many-body dynamics under realistic hardware conditions. We introduce a scalable fault-tolerant framework that combines coherent observable estimation with a space-time-efficient implementation of non-Clifford rotations, suppressing the residual logical errors that limit existing partially fault-tolerant approaches. A benchmark against state-of-the-art tensor-network and variational Monte Carlo algorithms reveals a concrete crossover for mixed-field Ising dynamics at modest system sizes. For a physical error rate of $p=10^{-3}$, fault-tolerant simulation requires approximately 2 hours and $3.7 \times 10^5$ physical qubits for a 100-site 1D system, whereas tensor network approaches would require about 100 years. For 2D models, where rapid entanglement growth limits the classical evolution time, we project quantum runtimes within minutes. A physical error rate of $p=10^{-4}$ leads to at least an order of magnitude reduction in qubit count ($3.1 \times 10^4$ physical qubits) and runtime (minutes for 1D and seconds for 2D). The reduction in quantum runtime arises from our improved rotation-state injection and co-design of quantum error correction and observable-estimation protocols, which jointly suppress logical-error accumulation and reduce sampling overhead. Our results establish a scalable route towards practical quantum advantage and identify quantitative engineering targets for future fault-tolerant architectures.