Variational Programs with Open Clocks

arXiv:2610.40988v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Variational quantum algorithms leave the durations of Hamiltonian evolutions open for a classical optimizer to set. We present VHamilton, a minimal extension of the Hamilton quantum programming language in which such durations are open clocks: one program denotes a family of Hamiltonian trajectories, and a valuation fills its clocks with exact dyadic times, so that each instance is an ordinary Hamilton program that compiles to circuits as before. Because the semantics stays exact and affine in the clocks, the Hamiltonian structure of a variational program remainsavail able for reasoning about every valuation at once.