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arXiv:1603.02724 · Physical Review A

Computational complexity of exterior products and multiparticle amplitudes of noninteracting fermions in entangled states

Dmitri A. Ivanov

Published Jul 17, 2017• 3 citations
arXivHTMLPDF

Abstract

Noninteracting bosons were proposed to be used for a demonstration of quantum-computing supremacy in a boson-sampling setup. A similar demonstration with fermions would require that the fermions are initially prepared in an entangled state. I suggest that pairwise entanglement of fermions would be sufficient for this purpose. Namely, it is shown that computing multiparticle scattering amplitudes for fermions entangled pairwise in groups of four single-particle states is #P-hard. In linear algebra, such amplitudes are expressed as exterior products of two-forms of rank 2. In particular, a permanent of a $N\ifmmode\times\else\texttimes\fi{}N$ matrix may be expressed as an exterior product of ${N}^{2}$ two forms of rank 2 in dimension $2{N}^{2}$, which establishes the #P-hardness of the latter.

DOI
10.1103/physreva.96.012322

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We study the computational complexity of quantum-mechanical expectation values of single-particle operators in bosonic and fermionic multiparticle product states. Such expectation values appear, in particular, in full-counting-statistics problems. Depending on the initial multiparticle product state, the expectation values may be either easy to compute (the required number of operations scales polynomially with the particle number) or hard to compute (at least as hard as a permanent of a matrix). However, if we only consider full counting statistics in a finite number of final single-particle states, then the full-counting-statistics generating function becomes easy to compute in all the analyzed cases. We prove the latter statement for the general case of the fermionic product state and for the single-boson product state (the same as used in the boson-sampling proposal). This result may be relevant for using multiparticle product states as a resource for quantum computing.
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It is known that computing the permanent of the matrix 1+A, where A is a finite-rank matrix, requires a number of operations polynomial in the matrix size. Motivated by the boson-sampling proposal of restricted quantum computation, I extend this result to a generalization of the matrix permanent: An expectation value in a product of a large number of identical bosonic states with a bounded number of bosons. This result complements earlier studies on the computational complexity in boson sampling and related setups. The proposed technique based on the Gaussian averaging is equally applicable to bosonic and fermionic systems. This also allows us to improve an earlier polynomial complexity estimate for the fermionic version of the same problem.
Quantum entanglement is a fundamental property of quantum mechanics and it serves as a basic resource in quantum computation and information. Despite its importance, the power and limitations of quantum entanglement are far from being fully understood. Here, we study entanglement via the lens of computational complexity. This is done by studying quantum generalizations of the class NP with multiple unentangled quantum proofs, the so-called QMA(2) and its variants. The complexity of QMA(2) is known to be closely connected to a variety of problems such as deciding if a state is entangled and several classical optimization problems. However, determining the complexity of QMA(2) is a longstanding open problem, and only the trivial complexity bounds ⊆ (2) ⊆ are known.