Interacting Boson Problems Can Be QMA Hard

Abstract

Computing the ground-state energy of interacting electron problems has recently been shown to be hard for quantum Merlin Arthur (QMA), a quantum analogue of the complexity class NP. Fermionic problems are usually hard, a phenomenon widely attributed to the so-called sign problem. The corresponding bosonic problems are, according to conventional wisdom, tractable. Here, we demonstrate that the complexity of interacting boson problems is also QMA hard. Moreover, the bosonic version of N-representability problem is QMA complete. Consequently, these problems are unlikely to have efficient quantum algorithms.