We establish the first general connection between the design of quantum algorithms and circuit lower bounds. Specifically, let $\mathfrak{C}$ be a class of polynomial-size concepts, and suppose that $\mathfrak{C}$ can be PAC-learned with membership queries under the uniform distribution with error $1/2 - γ$ by a time $T$ quantum algorithm. We prove that if $γ^2 \cdot T \ll 2^n/n$, then $\mathsf{BQE} \nsubseteq \mathfrak{C}$, where $\mathsf{BQE} = \mathsf{BQTIME}[2^{O(n)}]$ is an exponential-time analogue of $\mathsf{BQP}$. This result is optimal in both $γ$ and $T$, since it is not hard to learn any class $\mathfrak{C}$ of functions in (classical) time $T = 2^n$ (with no error), or in quantum time $T = \mathsf{poly}(n)$ with error at most $1/2 - Ω(2^{-n/2})$ via Fourier sampling. In other words, even a marginal improvement on these generic learning algorithms would lead to major consequences in complexity theory.
Our proof builds on several works in learning theory, pseudorandomness, and computational complexity, and crucially, on a connection between non-trivial classical learning algorithms and circuit lower bounds established by Oliveira and Santhanam (CCC 2017). Extending their approach to quantum learning algorithms turns out to create significant challenges. To achieve that, we show among other results how pseudorandom generators imply learning-to-lower-bound connections in a generic fashion, construct the first conditional pseudorandom generator secure against uniform quantum computations, and extend the local list-decoding algorithm of Impagliazzo, Jaiswal, Kabanets and Wigderson (SICOMP 2010) to quantum circuits via a delicate analysis. We believe that these contributions are of independent interest and might find other applications.
University of Waterloo（滑铁卢大学）；Massachusetts Institute of Technology（麻省理工学院）；Columbia University（哥伦比亚大学）
Monotone Boolean functions, and the monotone Boolean circuits that compute them, have been intensively studied in complexity theory. In this paper we study the structure of Boolean functions in terms of the minimum number of negations in any circuit computing them, a complexity measure that interpolates between monotone functions and the class of all functions. We study this generalization of monotonicity from the vantage point of learning theory, giving near-matching upper and lower bounds on the uniform-distribution learnability of circuits in terms of the number of negations they contain. O…
We investigate Clifford+$T$ quantum circuits with a small number of $T$-gates. Using the sparsification lemma, we identify time complexity lower bounds in terms of $T$-gate count below which a strong simulator would improve on the state-of-the-art $3$-SAT solving.
We show that any quantum circuit of treewidth $t$, built from $r$-qubit gates, requires at least $Ω(\frac{n^{2}}{2^{O(r\cdot t)}\cdot \log^4 n})$ gates to compute the element distinctness function. Our result generalizes a near-quadratic lower bound for quantum formula size obtained by Roychowdhury and Vatan [SIAM J. on Computing, 2001]. The proof of our lower bound follows by an extension of Nečiporuk's method to the context of quantum circuits of constant treewidth. This extension is made via a combination of techniques from structural graph theory, tensor-network theory, and the connected-c…
The quantum approximate optimization algorithm (QAOA) is a method of approximately solving combinatorial optimization problems. While QAOA is developed to solve a broad class of combinatorial optimization problems, it is not clear which classes of problems are best suited for it. One factor in demonstrating quantum advantage is the relationship between a problem instance and the circuit depth required to implement the QAOA method. As errors in NISQ devices increases exponentially with circuit depth, identifying lower bounds on circuit depth can provide insights into when quantum advantage coul…
Recently, Bravyi, Gosset, and König (Science, 2018) exhibited a search problem called the 2D Hidden Linear Function (2D HLF) problem that can be solved exactly by a constant-depth quantum circuit using bounded fan-in gates (or QNC^0 circuits), but cannot be solved by any constant-depth classical circuit using bounded fan-in AND, OR, and NOT gates (or NC^0 circuits). In other words, they exhibited a search problem in QNC^0 that is not in NC^0. We strengthen their result by proving that the 2D HLF problem is not contained in AC^0, the class of classical, polynomial-size, constant-depth circuits …
The No Low-energy Trivial States (NLTS) conjecture of Freedman and Hastings, 2014 -- which posits the existence of a local Hamiltonian with a super-constant quantum circuit lower bound on the complexity of all low-energy states -- identifies a fundamental obstacle to the resolution of the quantum PCP conjecture. In this work, we provide new techniques, based on entropic and local indistinguishability arguments, that prove circuit lower bounds for all the low-energy states of local Hamiltonians arising from quantum error-correcting codes. For local Hamiltonians arising from nearly linear-rate o…
The question of finding a lower bound on the number of Toffoli gates in a classical reversible circuit is addressed. A method based on quantum information concepts is proposed. The method involves solely concepts from quantum information - there is no need for an actual physical quantum computer. The method is illustrated on the example of classical Shannon data compression.
We show that the depth of quantum circuits in the realistic architecture where a classical controller determines which local interactions to apply on the kD grid Z^k where k >= 2 is the same (up to a constant factor) as in the standard model where arbitrary interactions are allowed. This allows minimum-depth circuits (up to a constant factor) for the nearest-neighbor architecture to be obtained from minimum-depth circuits in the standard abstract model. Our work therefore justifies the standard assumption that interactions can be performed between arbitrary pairs of qubits. In particular, our …
We provide an $Ω(log(n))$ lower bound for the depth of any quantum circuit generating the unique groundstate of Kitaev's spherical code. No circuit-depth lower bound was known before on this code in the general case where the gates can connect qubits even if they are far away; To the best of our knowledge, this is the first time a quantum circuit-depth lower bound is given for unique ground state of a {\it gapped} local Hamiltonian. Providing a lower bound in this case seems more challenging, since such systems exhibit exponential decay of correlations and standard lower bound techniques do no…
We investigate the Cherenkov radiation triggered by qubit acceleration simulated by superconducting circuit. By analyzing the radiation probability, we confirm the existence of Cherenkov speed threshold, implying that simulating superluminal qubit motion is possible for such a scenario. A question immediately arises: Is such motion compatible with the causality principle? To address the question, we perform a causality test on the simulating system based on the recently developed notion of temporal quantum correlations, pseudo-density matrix and temporal quantum steering. The results suggest t…
We consider a class of random quantum circuits where at each step a gate from a universal set is applied to a random pair of qubits, and determine how quickly averages of arbitrary finite-degree polynomials in the matrix elements of the resulting unitary converge to Haar measure averages. This is accomplished by establishing an exact mapping between the superoperator that describes t-order moments on n qubits and a multilevel SU(4^t) Lipkin-Meshkov-Glick Hamiltonian. For arbitrary fixed t, we find that the spectral gap scales as 1/n in the thermodynamic limit. Our results imply that random qua…
We define a quantum model for multiparty communication complexity and prove a simulation theorem between the classical and quantum models. As a result of our simulation, we show that if the quantum k-party communication complexity of a function f is $Ω(n/2^k)$, then its classical k-party communication is $Ω(n/2^{k/2})$. Finding such an f would allow us to prove strong classical lower bounds for (k>log n) players and hence resolve a main open question about symmetric circuits. Furthermore, we prove that for the Generalized Inner Product (GIP) function, the quantum model is exponentially more ef…
Scaling of variational quantum algorithms to large problem sizes requires efficient optimization of random parameterized quantum circuits. For such circuits with uncorrelated parameters, the presence of exponentially vanishing gradients in cost function landscapes is an obstacle to optimization by gradient descent methods. In this work, we prove that reducing the dimensionality of the parameter space by utilizing circuit modules containing spatially or temporally correlated gate layers can allow one to circumvent the vanishing gradient phenomenon. Examples are drawn from random separable circu…
We prove a nontrivial circuit-depth lower bound for preparing a low-energy state of a locally interacting quantum many-body system in two dimensions, assuming the circuit is geometrically local. For preparing any state which has an energy density of at most $ε$ with respect to Kitaev's toric code Hamiltonian on a two dimensional lattice $Λ$, we prove a lower bound of $Ω\left(\min\left(1/ε^{\frac{1-α}{2}}, \sqrt{|Λ|}\right)\right)$ for any $α>0$. We discuss two implications. First, our bound implies that the lowest energy density obtainable from a large class of existing variational circuits (e…
What is the minimal size quantum circuit required to exactly implement a specified n-qubit unitary operation, U, without the use of ancilla qubits? We show that a lower bound on the minimal size is provided by the length of the minimal geodesic between U and the identity, I, where length is defined by a suitable Finsler metric on SU(2^n). The geodesic curves of such a metric have the striking property that once an initial position and velocity are set, the remainder of the geodesic is completely determined by a second order differential equation known as the geodesic equation. This is in contr…
The multiplicative depth of a logic network over the gate basis $\{\land, \oplus, \neg\}$ is the largest number of $\land$ gates on any path from a primary input to a primary output in the network. We describe a dynamic programming based logic synthesis algorithm to reduce the multiplicative depth in logic networks. It makes use of cut enumeration, tree balancing, and exclusive sum-of-products (ESOP) representations. Our algorithm has applications to cryptography and quantum computing, as a reduction in the multiplicative depth directly translates to a lower $T$-depth of the corresponding quan…
A clear protocol for synthesis of sequential reversible circuits from any particular gate library has been provided. Using that protocol, reversible circuits for SR latch, D latch, JK latch and T latch are designed from NCT gate library. All the circuits have been optimized with the help of existing local optimization algorithms (e.g. template matching, moving rule and deletion rule). It has been shown that the present proposals have lower gate complexities, lower number of garbage bits, lower quantum cost and lower number of feedback loops compared to the earlier proposals. For a fair compari…
We show that if a language is recognized within certain error bounds by constant-depth quantum circuits over a finite family of gates, then it is computable in (classical) polynomial time. In particular, our results imply EQNC^0 is contained in P, where EQNC^0 is the constant-depth analog of the class EQP. On the other hand, we adapt and extend ideas of Terhal and DiVincenzo (quant-ph/0205133) to show that, for any family F of quantum gates including Hadamard and CNOT gates, computing the acceptance probabilities of depth-five circuits over F is just as hard as computing these probabilities fo…
Recently, it is shown that quantum computers can be used for obtaining certain information about the solution of a linear system Ax=b exponentially faster than what is possible with classical computation. Here we first review some key aspects of the algorithm from the standpoint of finding its efficient quantum circuit implementation using only elementary quantum operations, which is important for determining the potential usefulness of the algorithm in practical settings. Then we present a small-scale quantum circuit that solves a 2x2 linear system. The quantum circuit uses only 4 qubits, imp…
We prove several new lower bounds for constant depth quantum circuits. The main result is that parity (and hence fanout) requires log depth circuits, when the circuits are composed of single qubit and arbitrary size Toffoli gates, and when they use only constantly many ancillæ. Under this constraint, this bound is close to optimal. In the case of a non-constant number $a$ of ancillae, we give a tradeoff between $a$ and the required depth, that results in a non-trivial lower bound for fanout when $a = n^{1-o(1)}$.
Noise Correlations as a Resource in Pauli-Twirled Circuits
Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering, University of Chicago（芝加哥大学普里茨克分子工程学院）；Department of Physics and Astronomy, Northwestern University（西北大学物理与天文系）；National Center for Computational Sciences, Oak Ridge National Laboratory（橡树岭国家实验室国家计算科学中心）；IBM Quantum, IBM T.J. Watson Research Center（IBM量子，IBM T.J.沃森研究中心）
Circuit complexity lower bounds for quantum spin glasses
Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard（麻省理工学院和哈佛学院博德研究所）；Operations Research Center and Center for Statistics and Data Sciences, IDSS, Massachusetts Institute of Technology（麻省理工学院运筹学中心与统计与数据科学中心IDSS）
Noise in quantum systems is a major obstacle to implementing many quantum algorithms on large quantum circuits. In this work, we study the effects of noise on the Rademacher complexity of quantum circuits, which is a measure of statistical complexity that quantifies the richness of classes of functions generated by these circuits. We consider noise models that are represented by convex combinations of unitary channels and provide both upper and lower bounds for the Rademacher complexities of quantum circuits characterized by these noise models. In particular, we find a lower bound for the Rade…
Simulating quantum circuits using classical computers lets us analyse the inner workings of quantum algorithms. The most complete type of simulation, strong simulation, is believed to be generally inefficient. Nevertheless, several efficient strong simulation techniques are known for restricted families of quantum circuits and we develop an additional technique in this article. Further, we show that strong simulation algorithms perform another fundamental task: solving search problems. Efficient strong simulation techniques allow solutions to a class of search problems to be counted and found …
We consider a quantum circuit model describing the evaporation process of black holes. We specifically examine the behavior of the multipartite entanglement represented by this model, and find that the entanglement structure depends on the black hole mass $M$ and the frequency of the Hawking radiation $ω$. For sufficiently small values of $Mω$, the black hole and the radiation system becomes a separable state after the Page time and a firewall-like structure appears. On the contrary, for larger values of $Mω$, the entanglement between the black hole and the radiation is not lost. These behavio…
We provide algorithms for efficiently addressing quantum memory in parallel. These imply that the standard circuit model can be simulated with low overhead by the more realistic model of a distributed quantum computer. As a result, the circuit model can be used by algorithm designers without worrying whether the underlying architecture supports the connectivity of the circuit. In addition, we apply our results to existing memory intensive quantum algorithms. We present a parallel quantum search algorithm and improve the time-space trade-off for the Element Distinctness and Collision problems.
Topological quantum states cannot be created from product states with local quantum circuits of constant depth and are in this sense more entangled than topologically trivial states, but how entangled are they? Here we quantify the entanglement in one-dimensional topological states by showing that local quantum circuits of linear depth are necessary to generate them from product states. We establish this linear lower bound for both bosonic and fermionic one-dimensional topological phases and use symmetric circuits for phases with symmetry. We also show that the linear lower bound can be satura…
We present a new linear-depth ripple-carry quantum addition circuit. Previous addition circuits required linearly many ancillary qubits; our new adder uses only a single ancillary qubit. Also, our circuit has lower depth and fewer gates than previous ripple-carry adders.
We provide a simple framework for the synthesis of quantum circuits based on a numerical optimization algorithm. This algorithm is used in the context of the trapped-ions technology. We derive theoretical lower bounds for the number of quantum gates required to implement any quantum algorithm. Then we present numerical experiments with random quantum operators where we compute the optimal parameters of the circuits and we illustrate the correctness of the theoretical lower bounds. We finally discuss the scalability of the method with the number of qubits.
We present low-temperature measurements of low-loss superconducting nanowire-embedded resonators in the low-power limit relevant for quantum circuits. The superconducting resonators are embedded with superconducting nanowires with widths down to 20nm using a neon focused ion beam. In the low-power limit, we demonstrate an internal quality factor up to 3.9x10^5 at 300mK [implying a two-level-system-limited quality factor up to 2x10^5 at 10 mK], not only significantly higher than in similar devices but also matching the state of the art of conventional Josephson-junction-embedded resonators. We …
Circuit Harmonic Matrices: A Spectral Framework for Quantum Machine Learning
Quantum Software Lab, School of Informatics, The University of Edinburgh（爱丁堡大学信息学院量子软件实验室）；School of Physics and Astronomy, The University of Edinburgh（爱丁堡大学物理与天文学学院）
We study a reduced quantum circuit computation paradigm in which the only allowable gates either permute the computational basis states or else apply a "global Hadamard operation", i.e. apply a Hadamard operation to every qubit simultaneously. In this model, we discuss complexity bounds (lower-bounding the number of global Hadamard operations) for common quantum algorithms : we illustrate upper bounds for Shor's Algorithm, and prove lower bounds for Grover's Algorithm. We also use our formalism to display a gate that is neither quantum-universal nor classically simulable, on the assumption tha…
We propose a scheme for implementing cross Kerr nonlinearity between two superconducting transmission line resonators (TLR) via their interaction with a coupler which is constructed by two superconducting charge qubits connected to each other via a superconducting quantum interference device. When suitably driven, the coupler can induce very strong cross phase modulation (XPM) between the two TLRs due to its N-type level structure and the consequent electromagnetically induced transparency in its lowest states. The flexibility of our design can lead to various inter-TLR coupling configurations…
Small numbers of qubits are one of the primary constraints on the near-term deployment of advantageous quantum computing. To mitigate this constraint, techniques have been developed to break up a large quantum computation into smaller computations. While this work is sometimes called circuit knitting or divide and quantum we generically refer to it as circuit cutting (CC). Much of the existing work has focused on the development of more efficient circuit cutting schemes, leaving open questions on the limits of what theoretically optimal schemes can achieve. We develop bounds by breaking up pos…
Recently, it was shown that Repeat-Until-Success (RUS) circuits can achieve a $2.5$ times reduction in expected $T$-count over ancilla-free techniques for single-qubit unitary decomposition. However, the previously best known algorithm to synthesize RUS circuits requires exponential classical runtime. In this paper we present an algorithm to synthesize an RUS circuit to approximate any given single-qubit unitary within precision $\varepsilon$ in probabilistically polynomial classical runtime. Our synthesis approach uses the Clifford+$T$ basis, plus one ancilla qubit and measurement. We provide…
Although many of works have been done in multivalued quantum logic synthesis, the question whether multivalued quantum circuits are more efficient than the conventional binary quantum circuits is still open. In this article we devote to the optimization of generic multivalued quantum circuits. The multivalued quantum Shannon decompositions (QSD) are improved so that the circuits obtained are asymptotically optimal for all dimensionality d. The syntheses of uniformly multifold controlled $R_y$ rotations are also optimized to make the circuits further simplified. Moreover, the theoretical lower …
It was recently shown that for reasonable notions of approximation of states and functions by quantum circuits, almost all states and functions are exponentially hard to approximate [Knill 1995]. The bounds obtained are asymptotically tight except for the one based on total variation distance (TVD). TVD is the most relevant metric for the performance of a quantum circuit. In this paper we obtain asymptotically tight bounds for TVD. We show that in a natural sense, almost all states are hard to approximate to within a TVD of 2/e-εeven for exponentially small ε. The quantity 2/e is asymptoticall…
In a recent preprint by Deutsch et al. [1995] the authors suggest the possibility of polynomial approximability of arbitrary unitary operations on $n$ qubits by 2-qubit unitary operations. We address that comment by proving strong lower bounds on the approximation capabilities of g-qubit unitary operations for fixed g. We consider approximation of unitary operations on subspaces as well as approximation of states and of density matrices by quantum circuits in several natural metrics. The ability of quantum circuits to probabilistically solve decision problem and guess checkable functions is di…
Optically connecting quantum bits can effectively reduce decoherence and facilitate long-distance communication. Optically addressable spin-bearing molecules have been demonstrated to have a good potential for quantum computing. In this report optically induced exchange interactions and spin dynamics, which are inherently important for spin-based quantum computing, have been calculated for a bi-radical - a potential quantum computing circuit unit. Consistent with the previous experimental observation of spin coherence induced by optical excitation, our work demonstrated an optically driven qua…
