Complementarity between success probability and coherence in Grover search algorithm

Abstract

Coherence plays a very important role in Grover search algorithm (GSA). In this paper, we define the normalization coherence , where C is a coherence measurement. By virtue of the constraint of large N and Shannon's maximum entropy principle, a surprising complementary relationship between the coherence and the success probability of GSA is obtained. Namely, , where C is in terms of the relative entropy of coherence and l 1 norm of coherence, t is the number of the search iterations in GSA. Moreover, the equation holds no matter either in ideal or noisy environments. Considering the number of qubits is limited in the recent noisy intermediate-scale quantum (NISQ) era, some exact numerical calculation experiments are presented for different database sizes N with different types of noises. The results show that the complementarity between the success probability and the coherence almost always holds. This work provides a new perspective to improve the success probability by manipulating its complementary coherence, and vice versa. It has an excellent potential for helping quantum algorithms design in the NISQ era.