We study the effect of noise on the classical simulatability of quantum circuits defined by computationally tractable (CT) states and efficiently computable sparse (ECS) operations. Examples of such circuits, which we call CT-ECS circuits, are IQP, Clifford Magic, and conjugated Clifford circuits. This means that there exist various CT-ECS circuits such that their output probability distributions are anti-concentrated and not classically simulatable in the noise-free setting (under plausible assumptions). First, we consider a noise model where a depolarizing channel with an arbitrarily small constant rate is applied to each qubit at the end of computation. We show that, under this noise model, if an approximate value of the noise rate is known, any CT-ECS circuit with an anti-concentrated output probability distribution is classically simulatable. This indicates that the presence of small noise drastically affects the classical simulatability of CT-ECS circuits. Then, we consider an extension of the noise model where the noise rate can vary with each qubit, and provide a similar sufficient condition for classically simulating CT-ECS circuits with anti-concentrated output probability distributions.
We discuss the problem of when a set of measurements made on an entangled source can be simulated with a classically correlated source. This is discussed in general and some examples are given. The question of which aspects of quantum imaging can be simulated by classically correlated sources is examined.
Deterministic quantum computation with one quantum bit (DQC1) is a restricted model of quantum computing where the input state is the completely mixed state except for a single clean qubit, and only a single output qubit is measured at the end of the computing. It is proved that the restriction of quantum computation to the DQC1 model does not change the complexity classes NQP and SBQP. As a main consequence, it follows that the DQC1 model cannot be efficiently simulated by classical computers unless the polynomial-time hierarchy collapses to the second level (more precisely, to AM), which ans…
Boson Sampling is the problem of sampling from the same distribution as indistinguishable single photons at the output of a linear optical interferometer. It is an example of a non-universal quantum computation which is believed to be feasible in the near term and cannot be simulated on a classical machine. Like all purported demonstrations of "quantum supremacy", this motivates optimizing classical simulation schemes for a realistic model of the problem, in this case Boson Sampling when the implementations experience lost or distinguishable photons. Although current simulation schemes for suf…
Deterministic quantum computation with one quantum bit (DQC1) is a model of quantum computing where the input restricted to containing a single qubit in a pure state and with all other qubits in a completely-mixed state, with only a single qubit measurement at the end of the computation [E. Knill and R. Laflamme, Phys. Rev. Lett. {\bf81}, 5672 (1998)]. While it is known that DQC1 can efficiently solve several problems for which no known classical efficient algorithms exist, the question of whether DQC1 is really more powerful than classical computation remains open. In this paper, we introduce…
We investigate the boundary between classical and quantum computational power. This work consists of two parts. First we develop new classical simulation algorithms that are centered on sampling methods. Using these techniques we generate new classes of classically simulatable quantum circuits where standard techniques relying on the exact computation of measurement probabilities fail to provide efficient simulations. For example, we show how various concatenations of matchgate, Toffoli, Clifford, bounded-depth, Fourier transform and other circuits are classically simulatable. We also prove th…
As research on building scalable quantum computers advances, it is important to be able to certify their correctness. Due to the exponential hardness of classically simulating quantum computation, straight-forward verification through classical simulation fails. However, we can classically simulate small scale quantum computations and hence we are able to test that devices behave as expected in this domain. This constitutes the first step towards obtaining confidence in the anticipated quantum-advantage when we extend to scales which can no longer be simulated. Realistic devices have restricti…
The cost of simulating classically tractable quantum circuits and dynamics
Los Alamos National Laboratory（洛斯阿拉莫斯国家实验室）；European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN)（欧洲核子研究组织（CERN））；Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL)（洛桑联邦理工学院（EPFL））；Chulalongkorn University（朱拉隆功大学）
Aaronson and Arkhipov recently used computational complexity theory to argue that classical computers very likely cannot efficiently simulate linear, multimode, quantum-optical interferometers with arbitrary Fock-state inputs [Aaronson and Arkhipov, Theory Comput. 9, 143 (2013)]. Here we present an elementary argument that utilizes only techniques from quantum optics. We explicitly construct the Hilbert space for such an interferometer and show that its dimension scales exponentially with all the physical resources. We also show in a simple example just how the Schrödinger and Heisenberg pictu…
Dephasing decoherence induced by interaction of one qubit with a quantum bath can be simulated classically by random unitary evolution without the need for a bath and this random unitary evolution is equivalent to the quantum case. For a general dephasing model and a single qubit system, we explicitly construct the noise functional and completely specify the random unitary evolution. To demonstrate the technique, we applied our results to three paradigmatic models: spin-boson, central spin, and quantum impurity. For multiple qubits, we identify a class of generalized quantum dephasing models t…
A process of preparation, transmission and subsequent projective measurement of a qubit can be simulated by a classical model with only two bits of communication and some amount of shared randomness. However no model for n qubits with a finite amount of classical communication is known at present. A lower bound for the communication cost can provide useful hints for a generalization. It is known for example that the amount of communication must be greater than c 2^n, where c~0.01. The proof uses a quite elaborate theorem of communication complexity. Using a mathematical conjecture known as the…
Verification of NISQ era quantum devices demands fast classical simulation of large noisy quantum circuits. We present an algorithm based on the stabilizer formalism that can efficiently simulate noisy stabilizer circuits. Additionally, the protocol can efficiently simulate a large set of multi-qubit mixed states that are not mixtures of stabilizer states. The existence of these 'bound states' was previously only known for odd-dimensional systems like qutrits. The algorithm also has the favorable property that circuits with depolarizing noise are simulated much faster than unitary circuits. Th…
We study the physical resources required to implement general quantum operations, and provide new bounds on the minimum possible size which an environment must be in order to perform certain quantum operations. We prove that contrary to a previous conjecture, not all quantum operations on a single-qubit can be implemented with a single-qubit environment, even if that environment is initially prepared in a mixed state. We show that a mixed single-qutrit environment is sufficient to implement a special class of operations, the generalized depolarizing channels.
Simulating quantum contextuality with classical systems requires memory. A fundamental yet open question is what is the minimum memory needed and, therefore, the precise sense in which quantum systems outperform classical ones. Here, we make rigorous the notion of classically simulating quantum state-independent contextuality (QSIC) in the case of a single quantum system submitted to an infinite sequence of measurements randomly chosen from a finite QSIC set. We obtain the minimum memory needed to simulate arbitrary QSIC sets via classical systems under the assumption that the simulation shoul…
We introduce an intermediate quantum computing model built from translation-invariant Ising-interacting spins. Despite being non-universal, the model cannot be classically efficiently simulated unless the polynomial hierarchy collapses. Equipped with the intrinsic single-instance-hardness property, a single fixed unitary evolution in our model is sufficient to produce classically intractable results, compared to several other models that rely on implementation of an ensemble of different unitaries (instances). We propose a feasible experimental scheme to implement our Hamiltonian model using c…
We consider the adiabatic quantum algorithm for systems with "no sign problem", such as the transverse field Ising mode, and analyze the equilibration time for quantum Monte Carlo (QMC) on these systems. We ask: if the spectral gap is only inverse polynomially small, will equilibration methods based on slowly changing the Hamiltonian parameters in the QMC simulation succeed in a polynomial time? We show that this is not true, by constructing counter-examples. Some examples are Hamiltonians where the space of configurations where the wavefunction has non-negligible amplitude has a nontrivial fu…
An impossibility theorem on approximately simulating quantum non-integrable Hamiltonian systems is presented here. This result shows that there is a trade-off between the unitary property and the energy expectation conservation law in time-descretization of quantum non-integrable systems, whose classical counterpart is Ge-Marsden's impossibility result about simulating classically non-integrable Hamiltonian systems using integration schemes preserving symplectic (Lie-Poisson) property.
Hardness and Complexity Transition of Noisy Random Circuit Sampling
NextQuantum Center, Department of Physics and Astronomy, Seoul National University（首尔大学物理与天文学系 NextQuantum 中心）；Department of Physics, Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology（韩国科学技术院物理系）
BosonSampling is a restricted model of quantum computation proposed recently, where a non-adaptive linear-optical network is used to solve a sampling problem that seems to be hard for classical computers. Here we show that, even if the linear-optical network has a constant number (greater than four) of beam splitter layers, the exact version of the BosonSampling problem is still classically hard, unless the polynomial hierarchy collapses to its third level. This is based on similar result known for constant-depth quantum circuits and circuits of 2-local commuting gates (IQP).
Variational quantum eigensolver (VQE) is promising to show quantum advantage on near-term noisy-intermediate-scale quantum (NISQ) computers. One central problem of VQE is the effect of noise, especially the physical noise on realistic quantum computers. We study systematically the effect of noise for the VQE algorithm, by performing numerical simulations with various local noise models, including the amplitude damping, dephasing, and depolarizing noise. We show that the ground state energy will deviate from the exact value as the noise probability increase and normally noise will accumulate as…
We investigate the amount of noise required to turn a universal quantum gate set into one that can be efficiently modelled classically. This question is useful for providing upper bounds on fault tolerant thresholds, and for understanding the nature of the quantum/classical computational transition. We refine some previously known upper bounds using two different strategies. The first one involves the introduction of bi-entangling operations, a class of classically simulatable machines that can generate at most bipartite entanglement. Using this class we show that it is possible to sharpen pre…
Assume Alice and Bob share some bipartite $d$-dimensional quantum state. A well-known result in quantum mechanics says that by performing two-outcome measurements, Alice and Bob can produce correlations that cannot be obtained locally, i.e., with shared randomness alone. We show that by using only two bits of communication, Alice and Bob can classically simulate any such correlations. All previous protocols for exact simulation required the communication to grow to infinity with the dimension $d$. Our protocol and analysis are based on a power series method, resembling Krivine's bound on Groth…
We show that several quantum circuit families can be simulated efficiently classically if it is promised that their output distribution is approximately sparse i.e. the distribution is close to one where only a polynomially small, a priori unknown subset of the measurement probabilities are nonzero. Classical simulations are thereby obtained for quantum circuits which---without the additional sparsity promise---are considered hard to simulate. Our results apply in particular to a family of Fourier sampling circuits (which have structural similarities to Shor's factoring algorithm) but also to …
A quantum state is called concordant if it has zero quantum discord with respect to any part. By extension, a concordant computation is one such that the state of the computer, at each time step, is concordant. In this paper, I describe a classical algorithm that, given a product state as input, permits the efficient simulation of any concordant quantum computation having a conventional form and composed of gates acting on two or fewer qubits. This shows that such a quantum computation must generate quantum discord if it is to efficiently solve a problem that requires super-polynomial time cla…
We analyze the practical performance of quantum polar codes, by computing rigorous bounds on block error probability and by numerically simulating them. We evaluate our bounds for quantum erasure channels with coding block lengths between 2^10 and 2^20, and we report the results of simulations for quantum erasure channels, quantum depolarizing channels, and "BB84" channels with coding block lengths up to N = 1024. For quantum erasure channels, we observe that high quantum data rates can be achieved for block error rates less than 10^(-4) and that somewhat lower quantum data rates can be achiev…
We introduce an open-source software library Graphix, which optimizes and simulates measurement-based quantum computation (MBQC). By combining the measurement calculus with an efficient graph state simulator, Graphix allows the classical preprocessing of Pauli measurements in the measurement patterns, significantly reducing the number of operations required to perform the quantum computation while maintaining determinism. For a measurement pattern translated from a quantum circuit, this corresponds to the preprocessing of all Clifford gates, and this improvement in the one-way model is importa…
We introduce a new family of quantum circuits for which the scrambling of a subspace of non-local operators is classically simulable. We call these circuits `super-Clifford circuits', since the Heisenberg time evolution of these operators corresponds to a Clifford evolution in operator space. By simulating the Clifford evolution in operator space we are able to simulate the time evolution of certain single Pauli strings into operators with an operator entanglement that grows linearly with the number of qubits. These circuits provide a new technique for studying scrambling in systems with a lar…
We present a method for classically simulating quantum circuits based on the tensor contraction model of Markov and Shi (quant-ph/0511069). Using this method we are able to classically simulate the approximate quantum Fourier transform in polynomial time. Moreover, our approach allows us to formulate a condition for the composability of simulable quantum circuits. We use this condition to show that any circuit composed of a constant number of approximate quantum Fourier transform circuits and log-depth circuits with limited interaction range can also be efficiently simulated.
The search for new, application-specific quantum computers designed to outperform any classical computer is driven by the ending of Moore's law and the quantum advantages potentially obtainable. Photonic networks are promising examples, with experimental demonstrations and potential for obtaining a quantum computer to solve problems believed classically impossible. This introduces a challenge: how does one design or understand such photonic networks? One must be able to calculate observables using general methods capable of treating arbitrary inputs, dissipation and noise. We develop novel com…
Limitations of Noisy Geometrically Local Quantum Circuits
University of Maryland（马里兰大学）；Joint Center for Quantum Information & Computer Science, University of Maryland and NIST（马里兰大学与美国国家标准与技术研究院联合量子信息与计算中心）；IBM T. J. Watson Research Center（IBM托马斯·J·沃森研究中心）
BosonSampling is a well-defined scheme for demonstrating quantum supremacy with photons in near term. Although relying only on multi-photon interference in nonadaptive linear-optical networks, it is hard to simulate classically. Here we study BosonSampling using matrix product states, a powerful method from quantum many-body physics. This method stores the instantaneous quantum state during the evolution of photons in the optical quantum circuit, which allows us to reveal the dynamical features of single photons in BosonSampling devices, such as entanglement entropy growth. We show the flexibl…
An accurate description of electron transport at a molecular level requires a precise treatment of quantum effects. These effects play a crucial role in determining the electron transport properties of single molecules, such as current-voltage curves, which can be challenging to simulate classically. Here we introduce a quantum algorithm to efficiently calculate the electronic current through single-molecule junctions in the weak-coupling regime. We show that a quantum computer programmed to simulate vibronic transitions between different charge states of a molecule can be used to compute sequ…
Simulating complex molecules and materials is an anticipated application of quantum devices. With strong quantum advantage demonstrated in artificial tasks, we examine how such advantage translates into modeling physical problems of correlated electronic structure. We simulate static and dynamical electronic structure on a superconducting quantum processor derived from Google's Sycamore architecture for two representative correlated electron problems: the nitrogenase iron-sulfur molecular clusters, and $α$-ruthenium trichloride, a proximate spin-liquid material. To do so, we simplify the elect…
Vectorially structured light has emerged as an enabling tool in many diverse applications, from communication to imaging, exploiting quantum-like correlations courtesy of a non-separable spatially varying polarization structure. Creating these states at the source remains challenging and is presently limited to two-dimensional vectorial states by customized lasers. Here we invoke ray-wave duality in a simple laser cavity to produce polarization marked multi-path modes that are non-separable in three degrees of freedom and in eight dimensions. As a topical example, we use our laser to produce t…
The simulation of quantum systems is a task for which quantum computers are believed to give an exponential speedup as compared to classical ones. While ground states of one-dimensional systems can be efficiently approximated using Matrix Product States (MPS), their time evolution can encode quantum computations, so that simulating the latter should be hard classically. However, one might believe that for systems with high enough symmetry, and thus insufficient parameters to encode a quantum computation, efficient classical simulation is possible. We discuss supporting evidence to the contrary…
We analyze the complexity of classically simulating continuous-time dynamics of locally interacting quantum spin systems with a constant rate of entanglement breaking noise. We prove that a polynomial time classical algorithm can be used to sample from the state of the spins when the rate of noise is higher than a threshold determined by the strength of the local interactions. Furthermore, by encoding a 1D fault tolerant quantum computation into the dynamics of spin systems arranged on two or higher dimensional grids, we show that for several noise channels, the problem of weakly simulating th…
Quantum steering is observed when performing appropriate local measurements on an entangled state. Here we discuss the possibility of simulating classically this effect, using classical communication instead of entanglement. We show that infinite communication is necessary for exactly simulating steering for any pure entangled state, as well as for a class of mixed entangled states. Moreover, we discuss the communication cost of steering for general entangled states, as well as approximate simulation. Our findings reveal striking differences between Bell nonlocality and steering, and provide a…
Pauli Error Composition Determines the Multipartite Advantage in Conference Key Agreement
The Coding School dba Frontier Technology Institute（Frontier Technology Institute）；Department of Computer Science, University of Maryland, College Park, Maryland, USA（马里兰大学）
该研究通过精确模拟不同噪声下的 GHZ 会议密钥协商协议，发现 Pauli 错误组成决定其相对 BB84 的多体优势，并推导闭式速率证明噪声分散优于集中。
We introduce an enhanced technique for strong classical simulation of quantum circuits which combines the `sum-of-stabilisers' method with an automated simplification strategy based on the ZX-calculus. Recently it was shown that quantum circuits can be classically simulated by expressing the non-stabiliser gates in a circuit as magic state injections and decomposing them in chunks of 2-6 states at a time, obtaining sums of (efficiently-simulable) stabiliser states with many fewer terms than the naive approach. We adapt these techniques from the original setting of Clifford circuits with magic …
