Orkan: Cache-friendly simulation of quantum operations on hermitian operators

Quantum Physics [Submitted on 17 Apr 2026] Orkan: Cache-friendly simulation of quantum operations on hermitian operators Timo Ziegler Classical simulation of quantum operations is essential for algorithm design, noise characterisation, and benchmarking of quantum hardware. The most general physically realisable operation can be described by a positive linear map acting on a hermitian operator, representing either a density matrix or an observable. Established simulators vectorise the density matrix on an n-qubit Hilbert space and reuse state-vector kernels, storing all 2^{2n} elements and forgoing the benefits of hermitian symmetry. In this work, I introduce \emph{Orkan}, a simulation library that uses a tiled memory layout storing only the lower triangle of the hermitian matrix at tile granularity, roughly halving both the memory footprint and the wall time to simulate the evolution of quantum states under generic quantum operations. The implementation treats any hermitian operator uniformly and is agnostic to whether the Schrödinger or Heisenberg picture is used. Dedicated k-local conjugation algorithms update all entries of the hermitian matrix in a single pass. Benchmarks against Qiskit Aer, QuEST, and Qulacs show consistent wall-clock speedups of 2-4{\times} partly attributable to the reduced memory footprint. Comments: 10 pages, 6 figures. Submitted to IEEE Quantum Week 2026 (QCE26). Code: this https URL Subjects: Quantum Physics (quant-ph) Cite as: arXiv:2604.15765 [quant-ph]   (or arXiv:2604.15765v1 [quant-ph] for this version)   https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2604.15765 Focus to learn more Submission history From: Timo Ziegler [view email] [v1] Fri, 17 Apr 2026 07:08:53 UTC (564 KB) Access Paper: view license Current browse context: quant-ph < prev   |   next > new | recent | 2026-04 References & Citations INSPIRE HEP NASA ADS Google Scholar Semantic Scholar Export BibTeX Citation Bookmark Bibliographic Tools Bibliographic and Citation Tools Bibliographic Explorer Toggle Bibliographic Explorer (What is the Explorer?) Connected Papers Toggle Connected Papers (What is Connected Papers?) Litmaps Toggle Litmaps (What is Litmaps?) scite.ai Toggle scite Smart Citations (What are Smart Citations?) Code, Data, Media Demos Related Papers About arXivLabs Which authors of this paper are endorsers? | Disable MathJax (What is MathJax?)