Challenges
Datasets
Workspaces
Papers
Discussions
Leaderboard
Log inSign up
Challenges
Datasets
Workspaces
Papers
Discussions
Leaderboard
Blog
Job Board
Q3AS

© 2026 Aqora Quantum S.A.S.

TermsPrivacyLegal Notice

arXiv:2505.23893 · Quantum

A complexity theory for non-local quantum computation

Andreas Blühm, Simon Höfer, Alex May, Mikka Stasiuk, Philip Verduyn Lunel, Henry Yuen

Published Jul 1, 2026• 0 citations
arXivHTMLPDF

Abstract

Non-local quantum computation (NLQC) replaces a local interaction between two systems with a single round of communication and shared entanglement. Despite many partial results, it is known that a characterization of entanglement cost in at least certain NLQC tasks would imply significant breakthroughs in complexity theory. Here, we avoid these obstructions and take an indirect approach to understanding resource requirements in NLQC, which mimics the approach used by complexity theorists: we study the relative hardness of different NLQC tasks by identifying resource efficient reductions between them. Most significantly, we prove that f -measure and f -route, the two best studied NLQC tasks, are in fact equivalent under O ( 1 ) overhead reductions. This result simplifies many existing proofs in the literature and extends several new properties to f -measure. For instance, we obtain sub-exponential upper bounds on f -measure for all functions, and efficient protocols for functions in the complexity class M o d k L . Beyond this, we study a number of other examples of NLQC tasks and their relationships.

DOI
10.22331/q-2026-07-01-2152

Related papers

Equivalence of non-local computation tasks beyond Clifford operations

Andreas Bluhm, Simon Höfer, Alex May +2 more

Non-local quantum computation (NLQC) studies how two collaborating players can implement channels on distributed systems using a single simultaneous round of quantum communication and shared entanglement. NLQC has applications in diverse areas, ranging from quantum position-verification to quantum gravity. Recently, it has been realized that the relationships among families of NLQC tasks are highly structured: many seemingly distinct tasks are related by reductions, wherein implementations of one task can be used to efficiently implement a second task. This is analogous to the notion of reduction in complexity theory, and reveals the relative hardness of NLQC tasks. In this work we continue the study of reductions among NLQC tasks. We focus on NLQC examples of the greatest interest in quantum position-verification; in particular examples involving large classical inputs and fixed-size quantum inputs, since these constitute the most feasible protocols for position-verification schemes. Within this setting, we find many new relationships among NLQC tasks. For instance, protocols for the simplest example of redirecting a quantum system based on a classical control imply protocols for controlled single qubit measurements in arbitrary bases, the controlled application of any Clifford unitary, and even the controlled application of any unitary of the form $U=C_1DC_0$ with $D$ an arbitrary diagonal unitary and $C_0, C_1$ Clifford circuits. This implies that many feasible position-verification schemes have the same asymptotic scaling for their entanglement cost, and hence a similar level of security. Our techniques rely on ideas from gate teleportation and measurement based quantum computation, among other areas, bringing several new strategies into NLQC which may be of independent interest.

quant-pharXiv:2606.26354•Jun 26, 2026•0 citations

Entanglement cost in non-local quantum computation

Alex May

This is a book-length treatment of the subject of non-local quantum computation (NLQC). NLQC is a method for implementing quantum operations that interact two systems without directly bringing the systems together. Instead, a single round of communication and shared entanglement is used. NLQC has appeared in the context of quantum cryptography, computational complexity, communication complexity, quantum gravity, and other applications. The understanding of entanglement cost in NLQC is closely tied to questions in all of these areas. We review upper and lower bounds on entanglement cost, as well as some of the applications of NLQC and its connections to other subjects.

quant-pharXiv:2605.02840•May 5, 2026•0 citations

Lower bounds on non-local computation from controllable correlation

Richard Cleve, Alex May

Understanding entanglement cost in non-local quantum computation (NLQC) is relevant to complexity, cryptography, gravity, and other areas. This entanglement cost is largely uncharacterized; previous lower bound techniques apply to narrowly defined cases, and proving lower bounds on most simple unitaries has remained open. Here, we give two new lower bound techniques that can be evaluated for any unitary, based on their controllable correlation and controllable entanglement. For Haar random two qubit unitaries, our techniques typically lead to non-trivial lower bounds. Further, we obtain lower bounds on most of the commonly studied two qubit quantum gates, including CNOT, DCNOT, $\sqrt{\text{SWAP}}$, and the XX interaction, none of which previously had known lower bounds. For the CNOT gate, one of our techniques gives a tight lower bound, fully resolving its entanglement cost. The resulting lower bounds have parallel repetition properties, and apply in the noisy setting.

quant-pharXiv:2602.00255•Feb 3, 2026•0 citations

Relating non-local quantum computation to information theoretic cryptography

Rene Allerstorfer, Harry Buhrman, Alex May +2 more

Non-local quantum computation (NLQC) is a cheating strategy for position-verification schemes, and has appeared in the context of the AdS/CFT correspondence. Here, we connect NLQC to the wider context of information theoretic cryptography by relating it to a number of other cryptographic primitives. We show one special case of NLQC, known as f -routing, is equivalent to the quantum analogue of the conditional disclosure of secrets (CDS) primitive, where by equivalent we mean that a protocol for one task gives a protocol for the other with only small overhead in resource costs. We further consider another special case of position-verification, which we call coherent function evaluation (CFE), and show CFE protocols induce similarly efficient protocols for the private simultaneous message passing (PSM) scenario. By relating position-verification to these cryptographic primitives, a number of results in the information theoretic cryptography literature give new implications for NLQC, and vice versa. These include the first sub-exponential upper bounds on the worst case cost of f -routing of 2 O ( n log ⁡ n ) entanglement, the first example of an efficient f -routing strategy for a problem believed to be outside P / p o l y , linear lower bounds on quantum resources for CDS in the quantum setting, linear lower bounds on communication cost of CFE, and efficient protocols for CDS in the quantum setting for functions that can be computed with quantum circuits of low T depth.

arXiv:2306.16462•Quantum•Jun 27, 2024•11 citations

Perfect non-local quantum computation is impossible

Marten Folkertsma, Dmitry Grinko, Gina Muuss +1 more

Non-local quantum computation (NLQC) asks two parties to apply a joint operation to their quantum inputs using an entangled resource state and one round of simultaneous quantum communication. NLQC has applications across quantum information, including attacks on quantum position verification, communication complexity, and quantum gravity. Every bipartite unitary has an approximate NLQC protocol with finite entanglement, and exact protocols are known for several structured families. However, it has remained open whether every fixed unitary admits an exact protocol with finite-dimensional resources. We show that, even for two qubits, Haar-almost every unitary does not admit such a protocol, even when the resource state and local operations are tailored to the target. The proof first shows that smooth deformations of an exact protocol can only change its target by local unitaries. For a fixed architecture, semialgebraic geometry limits the exact protocols to finitely many connected families, so each architecture reaches only finitely many local-unitary orbits. Taking the union over all architectures, the exactly implementable unitaries form countably many local-unitary orbits. We also show that some natural targets do not admit a protocol: the controlled phase $\mathrm{diag}(1,1,1,e^{iθ})$ has no exact protocol with finite-dimensional resources whenever $e^{iθ}$ is transcendental, for instance for $θ= 1$. Our results also apply to localizable quantum measurements, whose outcome is obtained from local measurements on inputs and a shared entangled resource state without communication. A rank-one projective measurement in a Haar-random basis is almost surely not localizable with a finite-dimensional resource state and finitely many local outcomes.

quant-pharXiv:2609.40228•Oct 1, 2026•0 citations

Rank Lower Bounds on Non-Local Quantum Computation

Vahid R. Asadi, Culf, Eric, Alex May

A non-local quantum computation (NLQC) replaces an interaction between two quantum systems with a single simultaneous round of communication and shared entanglement. We study two classes of NLQC, f-routing and f-BB84, which are of relevance to classical information theoretic cryptography and quantum position-verification. We give the first non-trivial lower bounds on entanglement in both settings, but are restricted to lower bounding protocols with perfect correctness. Within this setting, we give a lower bound on the Schmidt rank of any entangled state that completes these tasks for a given function f(x,y) in terms of the rank of a matrix g(x,y) whose entries are zero when f(x,y) = 0, and strictly positive otherwise. This also leads to a lower bound on the Schmidt rank in terms of the non-deterministic quantum communication complexity of f(x,y). Because of a relationship between f-routing and the conditional disclosure of secrets (CDS) primitive studied in information theoretic cryptography, we obtain a new technique for lower bounding the randomness complexity of CDS.

Leibniz international proceedings in informatics•Jan 1, 2025•2 citations
Non-local quantum computation (NLQC) replaces a local interaction between two systems with a single round of communication and shared entanglement. Despite many partial results, it is known that a characterization of entanglement cost in at least certain NLQC tasks would imply significant breakthroughs in complexity theory. Here, we avoid these obstructions and take an indirect approach to understanding resource requirements in NLQC, which mimics the approach used by complexity theorists: we study the relative hardness of different NLQC tasks by identifying resource efficient reductions between them. Most significantly, we prove that f -measure and f -route, the two best studied NLQC tasks, are in fact equivalent under O ( 1 ) overhead reductions. This result simplifies many existing proofs in the literature and extends several new properties to f -measure. For instance, we obtain sub-exponential upper bounds on f -measure for all functions, and efficient protocols for functions in the complexity class M o d k L . Beyond this, we study a number of other examples of NLQC tasks and their relationships.
Non-local quantum computation (NLQC) studies how two collaborating players can implement channels on distributed systems using a single simultaneous round of quantum communication and shared entanglement. NLQC has applications in diverse areas, ranging from quantum position-verification to quantum gravity. Recently, it has been realized that the relationships among families of NLQC tasks are highly structured: many seemingly distinct tasks are related by reductions, wherein implementations of one task can be used to efficiently implement a second task. This is analogous to the notion of reduction in complexity theory, and reveals the relative hardness of NLQC tasks. In this work we continue the study of reductions among NLQC tasks. We focus on NLQC examples of the greatest interest in quantum position-verification; in particular examples involving large classical inputs and fixed-size quantum inputs, since these constitute the most feasible protocols for position-verification schemes. Within this setting, we find many new relationships among NLQC tasks. For instance, protocols for the simplest example of redirecting a quantum system based on a classical control imply protocols for controlled single qubit measurements in arbitrary bases, the controlled application of any Clifford unitary, and even the controlled application of any unitary of the form U=C1DC0U=C_1DC_0U=C1​DC0​ with DDD an arbitrary diagonal unitary and C0,C1C_0, C_1C0​,C1​ Clifford circuits. This implies that many feasible position-verification schemes have the same asymptotic scaling for their entanglement cost, and hence a similar level of security. Our techniques rely on ideas from gate teleportation and measurement based quantum computation, among other areas, bringing several new strategies into NLQC which may be of independent interest.
This is a book-length treatment of the subject of non-local quantum computation (NLQC). NLQC is a method for implementing quantum operations that interact two systems without directly bringing the systems together. Instead, a single round of communication and shared entanglement is used. NLQC has appeared in the context of quantum cryptography, computational complexity, communication complexity, quantum gravity, and other applications. The understanding of entanglement cost in NLQC is closely tied to questions in all of these areas. We review upper and lower bounds on entanglement cost, as well as some of the applications of NLQC and its connections to other subjects.
Understanding entanglement cost in non-local quantum computation (NLQC) is relevant to complexity, cryptography, gravity, and other areas. This entanglement cost is largely uncharacterized; previous lower bound techniques apply to narrowly defined cases, and proving lower bounds on most simple unitaries has remained open. Here, we give two new lower bound techniques that can be evaluated for any unitary, based on their controllable correlation and controllable entanglement. For Haar random two qubit unitaries, our techniques typically lead to non-trivial lower bounds. Further, we obtain lower bounds on most of the commonly studied two qubit quantum gates, including CNOT, DCNOT, SWAP\sqrt{\text{SWAP}}SWAP​, and the XX interaction, none of which previously had known lower bounds. For the CNOT gate, one of our techniques gives a tight lower bound, fully resolving its entanglement cost. The resulting lower bounds have parallel repetition properties, and apply in the noisy setting.
Non-local quantum computation (NLQC) is a cheating strategy for position-verification schemes, and has appeared in the context of the AdS/CFT correspondence. Here, we connect NLQC to the wider context of information theoretic cryptography by relating it to a number of other cryptographic primitives. We show one special case of NLQC, known as f -routing, is equivalent to the quantum analogue of the conditional disclosure of secrets (CDS) primitive, where by equivalent we mean that a protocol for one task gives a protocol for the other with only small overhead in resource costs. We further consider another special case of position-verification, which we call coherent function evaluation (CFE), and show CFE protocols induce similarly efficient protocols for the private simultaneous message passing (PSM) scenario. By relating position-verification to these cryptographic primitives, a number of results in the information theoretic cryptography literature give new implications for NLQC, and vice versa. These include the first sub-exponential upper bounds on the worst case cost of f -routing of 2 O ( n log ⁡ n ) entanglement, the first example of an efficient f -routing strategy for a problem believed to be outside P / p o l y , linear lower bounds on quantum resources for CDS in the quantum setting, linear lower bounds on communication cost of CFE, and efficient protocols for CDS in the quantum setting for functions that can be computed with quantum circuits of low T depth.
Non-local quantum computation (NLQC) asks two parties to apply a joint operation to their quantum inputs using an entangled resource state and one round of simultaneous quantum communication. NLQC has applications across quantum information, including attacks on quantum position verification, communication complexity, and quantum gravity. Every bipartite unitary has an approximate NLQC protocol with finite entanglement, and exact protocols are known for several structured families. However, it has remained open whether every fixed unitary admits an exact protocol with finite-dimensional resources. We show that, even for two qubits, Haar-almost every unitary does not admit such a protocol, even when the resource state and local operations are tailored to the target. The proof first shows that smooth deformations of an exact protocol can only change its target by local unitaries. For a fixed architecture, semialgebraic geometry limits the exact protocols to finitely many connected families, so each architecture reaches only finitely many local-unitary orbits. Taking the union over all architectures, the exactly implementable unitaries form countably many local-unitary orbits. We also show that some natural targets do not admit a protocol: the controlled phase diag(1,1,1,eiθ)\mathrm{diag}(1,1,1,e^{iθ})diag(1,1,1,eiθ) has no exact protocol with finite-dimensional resources whenever eiθe^{iθ}eiθ is transcendental, for instance for θ=1θ= 1θ=1. Our results also apply to localizable quantum measurements, whose outcome is obtained from local measurements on inputs and a shared entangled resource state without communication. A rank-one projective measurement in a Haar-random basis is almost surely not localizable with a finite-dimensional resource state and finitely many local outcomes.
A non-local quantum computation (NLQC) replaces an interaction between two quantum systems with a single simultaneous round of communication and shared entanglement. We study two classes of NLQC, f-routing and f-BB84, which are of relevance to classical information theoretic cryptography and quantum position-verification. We give the first non-trivial lower bounds on entanglement in both settings, but are restricted to lower bounding protocols with perfect correctness. Within this setting, we give a lower bound on the Schmidt rank of any entangled state that completes these tasks for a given function f(x,y) in terms of the rank of a matrix g(x,y) whose entries are zero when f(x,y) = 0, and strictly positive otherwise. This also leads to a lower bound on the Schmidt rank in terms of the non-deterministic quantum communication complexity of f(x,y). Because of a relationship between f-routing and the conditional disclosure of secrets (CDS) primitive studied in information theoretic cryptography, we obtain a new technique for lower bounding the randomness complexity of CDS.