Given two dense multivectors of the Clifford algebra
Cℓ(V,Q) with
N=2p+q coefficients, the fastest known classical algorithms compute their geometric product in
O(Nω/2) arithmetic operations, where
ω denotes the matrix multiplication exponent. I show that, under amplitude encoding, a quantum computer executes the geometric product in
O(polylogN) time, using logarithmic space with sublogarithmic circuit depth. This exponential speedup establishes Clifford multiplication as a quantum primitive, providing an efficient computational foundation for quantum geometric algorithms and relativistic simulations.
Circuit depth is a central resource in complexity theory. While bounded-depth classical circuits admit well-understood hierarchy theorems, the internal structure of constant-depth quantum computation remains comparatively unexplored.
We prove an explicit depth hierarchy theorem for
QNC0. For each
d≥12, we construct a family of two-round interactive problems on which no depth-
(d−1) quantum circuit can achieve near-perfect success, regardless of gate set, circuit size, or ancillary qubits. In contrast, we prove that our construction admits realizations by simple bounded fan-in quantum circuits of depth larger than
d by a small constant factor. Moreover, all bounded fan-in classical circuits of sublogarithmic depth (in the input size) fail to achieve perfect success on these tasks for every
d, yielding a hierarchy of problems that show unconditional quantum advantage of
QNC0 over
NC0.
A key obstacle is the scarcity of lower bound techniques for quantum circuits. To address this, we develop methods to analyze how depth affects a circuit's ability to realize nonlocal correlations amongst its output qubits in a fine-grained manner. Our approach exploits the correspondence between constraint systems and nonlocal games, translating group-theoretic constructions into rigid operator-valued constraint systems and then into non-local games. In particular, we construct constraint systems whose unique faithful operator-valued solutions require every perfect strategy, and every near-perfect strategy to a fixed precision, to implement multi-controlled phase operations. This reduces to a nonlocal unitary-synthesis problem, yielding depth lower bounds for both shallow quantum and classical circuits.
These results show that increasing depth strictly increases computational power within
QNC0, establishing a genuinely quantum hierarchy.