No Arabic abstract
When two spatially separated parties make measurements on an unknown entangled quantum state, what correlations can they achieve? How difficult is it to determine whether a given correlation is a quantum correlation? These questions are central to problems in quantum communication and computation. Previous work has shown that the general membership problem for quantum correlations is computationally undecidable. In the current work we show something stronger: there is a family of constant-sized correlations -- that is, correlations for which the number of measurements and number of measurement outcomes are fixed -- such that solving the quantum membership problem for this family is computationally impossible. Thus, the undecidability that arises in understanding Bell experiments is not dependent on varying the number of measurements in the experiment. This places strong constraints on the types of descriptions that can be given for quantum correlation sets. Our proof is based on a combination of techniques from quantum self-testing and from undecidability results of the third author for linear system nonlocal games.
The finiteness problem for automaton groups and semigroups has been widely studied, several partial positive results are known. However we prove that, in the most general case, the problem is undecidable. We study the case of automaton semigroups. Given a NW-deterministic Wang tile set, we construct an Mealy automaton, such that the plane admit a valid Wang tiling if and only if the Mealy automaton generates a finite semigroup. The construction is similar to a construction by Kari for proving that the nilpotency problem for cellular automata is unsolvable. Moreover Kari proves that the tiling of the plane is undecidable for NW-deterministic Wang tile set. It follows that the finiteness problem for automaton semigroup is undecidable.
We present a quasipolynomial-time algorithm for solving the weak membership problem for the convex set of separable, i.e. non-entangled, bipartite density matrices. The algorithm decides whether a density matrix is separable or whether it is eps-away from the set of the separable states in time exp(O(eps^-2 log |A| log |B|)), where |A| and |B| are the local dimensions, and the distance is measured with either the Euclidean norm, or with the so-called LOCC norm. The latter is an operationally motivated norm giving the optimal probability of distinguishing two bipartite quantum states, each shared by two parties, using any protocol formed by quantum local operations and classical communication (LOCC) between the parties. We also obtain improved algorithms for optimizing over the set of separable states and for computing the ground-state energy of mean-field Hamiltonians. The techniques we develop are also applied to quantum Merlin-Arthur games, where we show that multiple provers are not more powerful than a single prover when the verifier is restricted to LOCC protocols, or when the verification procedure is formed by a measurement of small Euclidean norm. This answers a question posed by Aaronson et al (Theory of Computing 5, 1, 2009) and provides two new characterizations of the complexity class QMA, a quantum analog of NP. Our algorithm uses semidefinite programming to search for a symmetric extension, as first proposed by Doherty, Parrilo and Spedialieri (Phys. Rev. A, 69, 022308, 2004). The bound on the runtime follows from an improved de Finetti-type bound quantifying the monogamy of quantum entanglement, proved in (arXiv:1010.1750). This result, in turn, follows from a new lower bound on the quantum conditional mutual information and the entanglement measure squashed entanglement.
We study the hardness of the dihedral hidden subgroup problem. It is known that lattice problems reduce to it, and that it reduces to random subset sum with density $> 1$ and also to quantum sampling subset sum solutions. We examine a decision version of the problem where the question asks whether the hidden subgroup is trivial or order two. The decision problem essentially asks if a given vector is in the span of all coset states. We approach this by first computing an explicit basis for the coset space and the perpendicular space. We then look at the consequences of having efficient unitaries that use this basis. We show that if a unitary maps the basis to the standard basis in any way, then that unitary can be used to solve random subset sum with constant density $>1$. We also show that if a unitary can exactly decide membership in the coset subspace, then the collision problem for subset sum can be solved for density $>1$ but approaching $1$ as the problem size increases. This strengthens the previous hardness result that implementing the optimal POVM in a specific way is as hard as quantum sampling subset sum solutions.
In this work, we initiate the study of the Minimum Circuit Size Problem (MCSP) in the quantum setting. MCSP is a problem to compute the circuit complexity of Boolean functions. It is a fascinating problem in complexity theory -- its hardness is mysterious, and a better understanding of its hardness can have surprising implications to many fields in computer science. We first define and investigate the basic complexity-theoretic properties of minimum quantum circuit size problems for three natural objects: Boolean functions, unitaries, and quantum states. We show that these problems are not trivially in NP but in QCMA (or have QCMA protocols). Next, we explore the relations between the three quantum MCSPs and their variants. We discover that some reductions that are not known for classical MCSP exist for quantum MCSPs for unitaries and states, e.g., search-to-decision reduction and self-reduction. Finally, we systematically generalize results known for classical MCSP to the quantum setting (including quantum cryptography, quantum learning theory, quantum circuit lower bounds, and quantum fine-grained complexity) and also find new connections to tomography and quantum gravity. Due to the fundamental differences between classical and quantum circuits, most of our results require extra care and reveal properties and phenomena unique to the quantum setting. Our findings could be of interest for future studies, and we post several open problems for further exploration along this direction.
Suppose a Boolean function $f$ is symmetric under a group action $G$ acting on the $n$ bits of the input. For which $G$ does this mean $f$ does not have an exponential quantum speedup? Is there a characterization of how rich $G$ must be before the function $f$ cannot have enough structure for quantum algorithms to exploit? In this work, we make several steps towards understanding the group actions $G$ which are quantum intolerant in this way. We show that sufficiently transitive group actions do not allow a quantum speedup, and that a well-shuffling property of group actions -- which happens to be preserved by several natural transformations -- implies a lack of super-polynomial speedups for functions symmetric under the group action. Our techniques are motivated by a recent paper by Chailloux (2018), which deals with the case where $G=S_n$. Our main application is for graph symmetries: we show that any Boolean function $f$ defined on the adjacency matrix of a graph (and symmetric under relabeling the vertices of the graph) has a power $6$ relationship between its randomized and quantum query complexities, even if $f$ is a partial function. In particular, this means no graph property testing problems can have super-polynomial quantum speedups, settling an open problem of Ambainis, Childs, and Liu (2011).