Constant-depth Quantum Circuit Research Articles

The complexity of NISQ

The recent proliferation of NISQ devices has made it imperative to understand their power. In this work, we define and study the complexity class NISQ, which encapsulates problems that can be efficiently solved by a classical computer with access to noisy quantum circuits. We establish super-polynomial separations in the complexity among classical computation, NISQ, and fault-tolerant quantum computation to solve some problems based on modifications of Simon’s problems. We then consider the power of NISQ for three well-studied problems. For unstructured search, we prove that NISQ cannot achieve a Grover-like quadratic speedup over classical computers. For the Bernstein-Vazirani problem, we show that NISQ only needs a number of queries logarithmic in what is required for classical computers. Finally, for a quantum state learning problem, we prove that NISQ is exponentially weaker than classical computers with access to noiseless constant-depth quantum circuits.

Approximate Unitary t-Designs by Short Random Quantum Circuits Using Nearest-Neighbor and Long-Range Gates

We prove that {{,textrm{poly},}}(t) cdot n^{1/D}-depth local random quantum circuits with two qudit nearest-neighbor gates on a D-dimensional lattice with n qudits are approximate t-designs in various measures. These include the “monomial” measure, meaning that the monomials of a random circuit from this family have expectation close to the value that would result from the Haar measure. Previously, the best bound was {{,textrm{poly},}}(t)cdot n due to Brandão–Harrow–Horodecki (Commun Math Phys 346(2):397–434, 2016) for D=1. We also improve the “scrambling” and “decoupling” bounds for spatially local random circuits due to Brown and Fawzi (Scrambling speed of random quantum circuits, 2012). One consequence of our result is that assuming the polynomial hierarchy ({{,mathrm{textsf{PH}},}}) is infinite and that certain counting problems are #{textsf{P}}-hard “on average”, sampling within total variation distance from these circuits is hard for classical computers. Previously, exact sampling from the outputs of even constant-depth quantum circuits was known to be hard for classical computers under these assumptions. However the standard strategy for extending this hardness result to approximate sampling requires the quantum circuits to have a property called “anti-concentration”, meaning roughly that the output has near-maximal entropy. Unitary 2-designs have the desired anti-concentration property. Our result improves the required depth for this level of anti-concentration from linear depth to a sub-linear value, depending on the geometry of the interactions. This is relevant to a recent experiment by the Google Quantum AI group to perform such a sampling task with 53 qubits on a two-dimensional lattice (Arute in Nature 574(7779):505–510, 2019; Boixo et al. in Nate Phys 14(6):595–600, 2018) (and related experiments by USTC), and confirms their conjecture that O(sqrt{n}) depth suffices for anti-concentration. The proof is based on a previous construction of t-designs by Brandão et al. (2016), an analysis of how approximate designs behave under composition, and an extension of the quasi-orthogonality of permutation operators developed by Brandão et al. (2016). Different versions of the approximate design condition correspond to different norms, and part of our contribution is to introduce the norm corresponding to anti-concentration and to establish equivalence between these various norms for low-depth circuits. For random circuits with long-range gates, we use different methods to show that anti-concentration happens at circuit size O(nln ^2 n) corresponding to depth O(ln ^3 n). We also show a lower bound of Omega (n ln n) for the size of such circuit in this case. We also prove that anti-concentration is possible in depth O(ln n ln ln n) (size O(n ln n ln ln n)) using a different model.

Deterministic Constant-Depth Preparation of the AKLT State on a Quantum Processor Using Fusion Measurements

A class of symmetry-protected topological states relevant for measurement-based quantum computation is shown to be constructible using only constant-depth quantum circuits by leveraging symmetries, midcircuit measurements, and feed forward.

Possibilistic simulation of quantum circuits by classical circuits

In a breakthrough work, Bravyi, Gosset, and K\"onig (BGK) [Science 362, 308 (2018)] unconditionally proved that constant-depth quantum circuits are more powerful than their classical counterparts. Their result is equivalent to saying that a particular family of constant-depth quantum circuits takes classical circuits at least $\mathrm{\ensuremath{\Omega}}(logn)$ depth to ``simulate,'' in a certain sense. In our paper, we formalize their sense of simulation, which we call ``possibilistic simulation'' or ``$p$-simulation,'' and construct explicit classical circuits that can $p$-simulate any depth-$d$ quantum circuit with Clifford and $t\phantom{\rule{4pt}{0ex}}T$-gates in depth $O(d+t)$. Our classical circuits use ${\mathrm{NOT},\mathrm{AND},\mathrm{OR}}$ gates of fan-in $\ensuremath{\le}2$.

Quantum advantage through the magic pentagram problem

Through the two specific problems, the 2D hidden linear function problem and the 1D magic square problem, Bravyi et al. have recently shown that there exists a separation between $\mathbf{QNC^0}$ and $\mathbf{NC^0}$, where $\mathbf{QNC^0}$ and $\mathbf{NC^0}$ are the classes of polynomial-size and constant-depth quantum and classical circuits with bounded fan-in gates, respectively. In this paper, we present another problem with the same property, the magic pentagram problem based on the magic pentagram game, which is a nonlocal game. In other words, we show that the problem can be solved with certainty by a $\mathbf{QNC^0}$ circuit but not by any $\mathbf{NC^0}$ circuits.

Depth-efficient proofs of quantumness

A proof of quantumness is a type of challenge-response protocol in which a classical verifier can efficiently certify the quantum advantage of an untrusted prover. That is, a quantum prover can correctly answer the verifier's challenges and be accepted, while any polynomial-time classical prover will be rejected with high probability, based on plausible computational assumptions. To answer the verifier's challenges, existing proofs of quantumness typically require the quantum prover to perform a combination of polynomial-size quantum circuits and measurements. In this paper, we give two proof of quantumness constructions in which the prover need only perform constant-depth quantum circuits (and measurements) together with log-depth classical computation. Our first construction is a generic compiler that allows us to translate all existing proofs of quantumness into constant quantum depth versions. Our second construction is based around the learning with rounding problem, and yields circuits with shorter depth and requiring fewer qubits than the generic construction. In addition, the second construction also has some robustness against noise.

Quantum Algorithm of the Divide-and-Conquer Unitary Coupled Cluster Method with a Variational Quantum Eigensolver.

The variational quantum eigensolver (VQE) with shallow or constant-depth quantum circuits is one of the most pursued approaches in the noisy intermediate-scale quantum (NISQ) devices with incoherent errors. In this study, the divide-and-conquer (DC) linear scaling technique, which divides the entire system into several fragments, is applied to the VQE algorithm based on the unitary coupled cluster (UCC) method, denoted as DC-qUCC/VQE, to reduce the number of required qubits. The unitarity of the UCC ansatz that enables the evaluation of the total energy as well as various molecular properties as expectation values can be easily implemented on quantum devices because the quantum gates are unitary operators themselves. Based on this feature, the present DC-qUCC/VQE algorithm is designed to conserve the total number of electrons in the entire system using the density matrix evaluated on a quantum computer. Numerical assessments clarified that the energy errors of the DC-qUCC/VQE calculations decrease by using the constraint of the total number of electrons. Furthermore, the DC-qUCC/VQE algorithm could reduce the number of quantum gates and shows the possibility of decreasing incoherent errors.

Variational quantum amplitude estimation

We propose to perform amplitude estimation with the help of constant-depth quantum circuits that variationally approximate states during amplitude amplification. In the context of Monte Carlo (MC) integration, we numerically show that shallow circuits can accurately approximate many amplitude amplification steps. We combine the variational approach with maximum likelihood amplitude estimation [Y. Suzuki et al., Quantum Inf. Process. 19, 75 (2020)] in variational quantum amplitude estimation (VQAE). VQAE typically has larger computational requirements than classical MC sampling. To reduce the variational cost, we propose adaptive VQAE and numerically show in 6 to 12 qubit simulations that it can outperform classical MC sampling.

Mapping between Morita-equivalent string-net states with a constant depth quantum circuit

We construct a constant depth quantum circuit that maps between Morita equivalent string-net models. Due to its constant depth and unitarity, the circuit cannot alter the topological order, which demonstrates that Morita equivalent string-nets are in the same phase. The circuit is constructed from an invertible bimodule category connecting the two input fusion categories of the relevant string-net models, acting as a generalized Fourier transform for fusion categories. The circuit does not only act on the ground state subspace, but acts unitarily on the full Hilbert space when supplemented with ancillas.

Finding the disjointness of stabilizer codes is NP-complete

The disjointness of a stabilizer code is a quantity used to constrain the level of the logical Clifford hierarchy attainable by transversal gates and constant-depth quantum circuits. We show that for any positive integer constant $c$, the problem of calculating the $c$-disjointness, or even approximating it to within a constant multiplicative factor, is NP-complete. We provide bounds on the disjointness for various code families, including the Calderbank-Shor-Steane codes, concatenated codes, and hypergraph product codes. We also describe numerical methods of finding the disjointness, which can be readily used to rule out the existence of any transversal gate implementing some non-Clifford logical operation in small stabilizer codes. Our results indicate that finding fault-tolerant logical gates for generic quantum error-correcting codes is a computationally challenging task.

Clifford quantum cellular automata: Trivial group in 2D and Witt group in 3D

We study locality preserving automorphisms of operator algebras on D-dimensional uniform lattices of prime p-dimensional qudits quantum cellular automata (QCAs), specializing in those that are translation invariant (TI), and map every prime p-dimensional Pauli matrix to a tensor product of Pauli matrices (Clifford). We associate antihermitian forms of the unit determinant over Laurent polynomial rings to TI Clifford QCA with lattice boundaries and prove that the form determines the QCA up to Clifford circuits and shifts (trivial). It follows that every 2D TI Clifford QCA is trivial since the antihermitian form in this case is always trivial. Furthermore, we prove that for any D, the fourth power of any TI Clifford QCA is trivial. We present explicit examples of nontrivial TI Clifford QCA for D = 3 and any odd prime p and show that the Witt group of the finite field Fp is a subgroup of the group C(D=3,p) of all TI Clifford QCA modulo trivial ones. That is, C(D=3,p≡1mod4)⊇Z2×Z2 and C(D=3,p≡3mod4)⊇Z4. The examples are found by disentangling the ground state of a commuting Pauli Hamiltonian, which is constructed by coupling layers of prime dimensional toric codes such that an exposed surface has an anomalous topological order that is not realizable by commuting Pauli Hamiltonians strictly in two dimensions. In an appendix independent of the main body of this paper, we revisit a recent theorem of Freedman and Hastings that any two-dimensional QCA, which is not necessarily Clifford or translation invariant, is a constant depth quantum circuit followed by a shift. We give a more direct proof of the theorem without using any ancillas.

Trading Locality for Time: Certifiable Randomness from Low-Depth Circuits

The generation of certifiable randomness is the most fundamental information-theoretic task that meaningfully separates quantum devices from their classical counterparts. We propose a protocol for exponential certified randomness expansion using a single quantum device. The protocol calls for the device to implement a simple quantum circuit of constant depth on a 2D lattice of qubits. The output of the circuit can be verified classically in linear time, and is guaranteed to contain a polynomial number of certified random bits assuming that the device used to generate the output operated using a (classical or quantum) circuit of sub-logarithmic depth. This assumption contrasts with the locality assumption used for randomness certification based on Bell inequality violation and more recent proposals for randomness certification based on computational assumptions. Furthermore, to demonstrate randomness generation it is sufficient for a device to sample from the ideal output distribution within constant statistical distance. Our procedure is inspired by recent work of Bravyi et al. (Science 362(6412):308–311, 2018), who introduced a relational problem that can be solved by a constant-depth quantum circuit, but provably cannot be solved by any classical circuit of sub-logarithmic depth. We develop the discovery of Bravyi et al. into a framework for robust randomness expansion. Our results lead to a new proposal for a demonstrated quantum advantage that has some advantages compared to existing proposals. First, our proposal does not rest on any complexity-theoretic conjectures, but relies on the physical assumption that the adversarial device being tested implements a circuit of sub-logarithmic depth. Second, success on our task can be easily verified in classical linear time. Finally, our task is more noise-tolerant than most other existing proposals that can only tolerate multiplicative error, or require additional conjectures from complexity theory; in contrast, we are able to allow a small constant additive error in total variation distance between the sampled and ideal distributions.

Classical algorithms for quantum mean values

We consider the task of estimating the expectation value of an $n$-qubit tensor product observable $O_1\otimes O_2\otimes \cdots \otimes O_n$ in the output state of a shallow quantum circuit. This task is a cornerstone of variational quantum algorithms for optimization, machine learning, and the simulation of quantum many-body systems. Here we study its computational complexity for constant-depth quantum circuits and three types of single-qubit observables $O_j$ which are (a) close to the identity, (b) positive semidefinite, (c) arbitrary. It is shown that the mean value problem admits a classical approximation algorithm with runtime scaling as $\mathrm{poly}(n)$ and $2^{\tilde{O}(\sqrt{n})}$ in cases (a,b) respectively. In case (c) we give a linear-time algorithm for geometrically local circuits on a two-dimensional grid. The mean value is approximated with a small relative error in case (a), while in cases (b,c) we satisfy a less demanding additive error bound. The algorithms are based on (respectively) Barvinok's polynomial interpolation method, a polynomial approximation for the OR function arising from quantum query complexity, and a Monte Carlo method combined with Matrix Product State techniques. We also prove a technical lemma characterizing a zero-free region for certain polynomials associated with a quantum circuit, which may be of independent interest.

Fault-tolerant quantum speedup from constant depth quantum circuits

A defining feature in the field of quantum computing is the potential of a quantum device to outperform its classical counterpart for a specific computational task. By now, several proposals exist showing that certain sampling problems can be done efficiently quantumly, but are not possible efficiently classically, assuming strongly held conjectures in complexity theory. A feature dubbed quantum speedup. However, the effect of noise on these proposals is not well understood in general, and in certain cases it is known that simple noise can destroy the quantum speedup. Here we develop a fault-tolerant version of one family of these sampling problems, which we show can be implemented using quantum circuits of constant depth. We present two constructions, each taking $poly(n)$ physical qubits, some of which are prepared in noisy magic states. The first of our constructions is a constant depth quantum circuit composed of single and two-qubit nearest neighbour Clifford gates in four dimensions. This circuit has one layer of interaction with a classical computer before final measurements. Our second construction is a constant depth quantum circuit with single and two-qubit nearest neighbour Clifford gates in three dimensions, but with two layers of interaction with a classical computer before the final measurements. For each of these constructions, we show that there is no classical algorithm which can sample according to its output distribution in $poly(n)$ time, assuming two standard complexity theoretic conjectures hold. The noise model we assume is the so-called local stochastic quantum noise. Along the way, we introduce various new concepts such as constant depth magic state distillation (MSD), and constant depth output routing, which arise naturally in measurement based quantum computation (MBQC), but have no constant-depth analogue in the circuit model.

Instantaneous braids and Dehn twists in topologically ordered states

A defining feature of topologically ordered states of matter is the existence of locally indistinguishable states on spaces with non-trivial topology. These degenerate states form a representation of the mapping class group (MCG) of the space, which is generated by braids of defects or anyons, and by Dehn twists along non-contractible cycles. These operations can be viewed as fault-tolerant logical gates in the context of topological quantum error correcting codes and topological quantum computation. Here we show that braids and Dehn twists can in general be implemented by a constant depth quantum circuit, with a depth that is independent of code distance $d$ and system size. The circuit consists of a constant depth local quantum circuit (LQC) implementing a local geometry deformation of the quantum state, followed by a permutation on (relabelling of) the qubits. The permutation requires permuting qubits that are separated by a distance of order $d$; it can be implemented by collective classical motion of mobile qubits or as a constant depth circuit using long-range SWAP operations (with a range set by $d$) on immobile qubits. Applying these results to certain non-Abelian quantum error correcting codes demonstrates how universal logical gate sets can be implemented on encoded qubits using only constant depth unitary circuits.

An entropic invariant for 2D gapped quantum phases

We introduce an entropic quantity for two-dimensional quantum spin systems to characterize gapped quantum phases modeled by local commuting projector code Hamiltonians. The definition is based on a recently introduced specific operator algebra defined on an annular region, which encodes the superselection sectors of the model. The quantity is calculable from local properties, and it is invariant under any constant-depth local quantum circuit, and thus an indicator of gapped quantum spin-liquids. We explicitly calculate the quantity for Kitaev’s quantum double models, and show that the value is exactly same as the topological entanglement entropy (TEE) of the models. Our method circumvents some of the problems around extracting the TEE, allowing us to prove invariance under constant-depth quantum circuits.

Locally accurate MPS approximations for ground states of one-dimensional gapped local Hamiltonians

A key feature of ground states of gapped local 1D Hamiltonians is their relatively low entanglement --- they are well approximated by matrix product states (MPS) with bond dimension scaling polynomially in the lengthNof the chain, while general states require a bond dimension scaling exponentially. We show that the bond dimension of these MPS approximations can be improved to a constant, independent of the chain length, if we relax our notion of approximation to be more local: for all length-ksegments of the chain, the reduced density matrices of our approximations areϵ-close to those of the exact state. If the state is a ground state of a gapped local Hamiltonian, the bond dimension of the approximation scales like(k/ϵ)1+o(1), and at the expense of worse but still poly(k,1/ϵ)scaling of the bond dimension, we give an alternate construction with the additional features that it can be generated by a constant-depth quantum circuit with nearest-neighbor gates, and that it applies generally for any state with exponentially decaying correlations. For a completely general state, we give an approximation with bond dimensionexp⁡(O(k/ϵ)), which is exponentially worse, but still independent ofN. Then, we consider the prospect of designing an algorithm to find a local approximation for ground states of gapped local 1D Hamiltonians. When the Hamiltonian is translationally invariant, we show that the ability to findO(1)-accurate local approximations to the ground state inT(N)time implies the ability to estimate the ground state energy toO(1)precision inO(T(N)log⁡(N))time.

Quantum Approximate Markov Chains are Thermal

We prove that any one-dimensional (1D) quantum state with small quantum conditional mutual information in all certain tripartite splits of the system, which we call a quantum approximate Markov chain, can be well-approximated by a Gibbs state of a short-range quantum Hamiltonian. Conversely, we also derive an upper bound on the (quantum) conditional mutual information of Gibbs states of 1D short-range quantum Hamiltonians. We show that the conditional mutual information between two regions A and C conditioned on the middle region B decays exponentially with the square root of the length of B. These two results constitute a variant of the Hammersley-Clifford theorem (which characterizes Markov networks, i.e. probability distributions which have vanishing conditional mutual information, as Gibbs states of classical short-range Hamiltonians) for 1D quantum systems. The result can be seen as a strengthening - for 1D systems - of the mutual information area law for thermal states. It directly implies an efficient preparation of any 1D Gibbs state at finite temperature by a constant-depth quantum circuit.

Protected gates for topological quantum field theories

We study restrictions on locality-preserving unitary logical gates for topological quantum codes in two spatial dimensions. A locality-preserving operation is one which maps local operators to local operators — for example, a constant-depth quantum circuit of geometrically local gates, or evolution for a constant time governed by a geometrically local bounded-strength Hamiltonian. Locality-preserving logical gates of topological codes are intrinsically fault tolerant because spatially localized errors remain localized, and hence sufficiently dilute errors remain correctable. By invoking general properties of two-dimensional topological field theories, we find that the locality-preserving logical gates are severely limited for codes which admit non-abelian anyons, in particular, there are no locality-preserving logical gates on the torus or the sphere with M punctures if the braiding of anyons is computationally universal. Furthermore, for Ising anyons on the M-punctured sphere, locality-preserving gates must be elements of the logical Pauli group. We derive these results by relating logical gates of a topological code to automorphisms of the Verlinde algebra of the corresponding anyon model, and by requiring the logical gates to be compatible with basis changes in the logical Hilbert space arising from local F-moves and the mapping class group.

Complexity of simulating constant-depth BosonSampling

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).