Demonstrating a quantum computational speed-up is a crucial milestone for near-term quantum technology. Recently, sampling protocols for quantum simulators have been proposed that have the potential to show such a quantum advantage, based on commonly made assumptions. The key challenge in the theoretical analysis of this scheme-as of other comparable schemes such as boson sampling-is to lessen the assumptions and close the theoretical loopholes, replacing them by rigorous arguments. In this work, we prove two open conjectures for a simple sampling protocol that is based on the continuous time evolution of a translation-invariant Ising Hamiltonian: anticoncentration of the generated probability distributions and average-case hardness of exactly evaluating those probabilities. The latter is proven building upon recently developed techniques for random circuit sampling. For the former, we exploit the insight that approximate 2-designs for the unitary group admit anticoncentration. We then develop new techniques to prove that the 2D time evolution of the protocol gives rise to approximate 2-designs. Our work provides the strongest theoretical evidence to date that Hamiltonian quantum simulators are classically intractable.
Random circuit sampling of bitstrings from a Haar-random quantum state is widely believed to be classically intractable, and has therefore been implemented as a primary benchmark for demonstrating quantum advantage. Here, we challenge this premise by proposing an efficient classical frozen-tree sampling algorithm that exploits the conditional scale invariance of Haar-random quantum states [Oh, arXiv:2602.19448]. The frozen-tree sampler draws bitstrings of
n qubits in
O(n) time per sample. Moreover, its output probability
pF(x) is statistically identical to the probability
pC(x) of a random quantum circuit, since both are independent instances of the same Dirichlet distribution. Consequently, no statistical test acting on samples alone can distinguish the classical frozen-tree sampler from a quantum random circuit. The claimed quantum advantage of random circuit sampling therefore does not withstand scrutiny: its hardness lies not in sampling from the Dirichlet distribution, which is classically efficient, but in identifying a specific circuit realization.
We consider quantum circuits consisting of randomly chosen two-local gates and study the number of gates needed for the distribution over measurement outcomes for typical circuit instances to be anticoncentrated, roughly meaning that the probability mass is not too concentrated on a small number of measurement outcomes.An understanding of the conditions for anticoncentration is important for determining which quantum circuits are difficult to simulate classically, as anticoncentration has been in some cases an ingredient of mathematical arguments that simulation is hard and in other cases a necessary condition for easy simulation.Our definition of anticoncentration is that the expected collision probability of the distribution-that is, the probability that two independently drawn outcomes will agree-is only a constant factor larger than the collision probability for the uniform distribution.We show that when the two-local gates are each drawn from the Haar measure (or any 2-design), at least (n log(n)) gates (and thus (log(n)) circuit depth) are needed for this condition to be met on an n-qudit circuit.In both the case where the gates are nearest neighbor on a one-dimensional ring and the case where gates are long range, we show that O(n log(n)) gates are also sufficient and we precisely compute the optimal constant prefactor for the n log(n).The technique we employ relies upon a mapping from the expected collision probability to the partition function of an Ising-like classical statistical-mechanical model, which we manage to bound using stochastic and combinatorial techniques.
Sampling problems give some of the clearest conditional separations between quantum and classical computation. In Fermion Sampling, passive linear optics acts on a non-Gaussian magic input. Globally Haar-random transformations give anticoncentration and high-precision average-case hardness, but require linear depth and quadratically many gates. A natural open question is whether linear depth is necessary?
We show that logarithmic depth suffices for both guarantees in the same ensemble. For fresh uniform matchings with independent Haar two-mode gates, the collision reaches the passive-Haar scale at a sharp threshold of
logn/log(9/4)≈0.855log2n layers, with an explicit limiting transition profile and a matching lower bound from two-particle correlations. The mechanism is input-dependent: the magic input suppresses the extensive weight of the slowest relaxation mode, leaving the next to set the scale. An occupation-basis input retains large collision even under full Haar randomness.
At a larger logarithmic depth, we prove, in the real-RAM model, average-case
#P-hardness of estimating output probabilities to additive error
2−O(nlog2n) on any fixed fraction of instances above
3/4. We construct hard instances in four native layers, embed them in typical schedules, and interpolate along Cayley paths using a rational linear-program decoder. A finite
192-gate alphabet preserves the collision law exactly. Both guarantees use logarithmic native fermionic depth between arbitrary mode pairs and
O(nlogn) gates, replacing the global-Haar construction's quadratic budget. The accuracy proved is finer than the
1/N scale, where
N=(n/2n), required by sampling-to-counting; hardness of sampling within constant total-variation distance remains open.
As Moore's law reaches its limits, quantum computers are emerging with the promise of dramatically outperforming classical computers. We have witnessed the advent of quantum processors with over
50 quantum bits (qubits), which are expected to be beyond the reach of classical simulation. Quantum supremacy is the event at which the old Extended Church-Turing Thesis is overturned: A quantum computer performs a task that is practically impossible for any classical (super)computer. The demonstration requires both a solid theoretical guarantee and an experimental realization. The lead candidate is Random Circuit Sampling (RCS), which is the task of sampling from the output distribution of random quantum circuits. Google recently announced a
53−qubit experimental demonstration of RCS. Soon after, classical algorithms appeared that challenge the supremacy of random circuits by estimating their outputs. How hard is it to classically simulate the output of random quantum circuits? We prove that estimating the output probabilities of random quantum circuits is formidably hard (
#P-Hard) for any classical computer. This makes RCS the strongest candidate for demonstrating quantum supremacy relative to all other proposals. The robustness to the estimation error that we prove may serve as a new hardness criterion for the performance of classical algorithms. To achieve this, we introduce the Cayley path interpolation between any two gates of a quantum computation and convolve recent advances in quantum complexity and information with probability and random matrices. Furthermore, we apply algebraic geometry to generalize the well-known Berlekamp-Welch algorithm that is widely used in coding theory and cryptography. Our results imply that there is an exponential hardness barrier for the classical simulation of most quantum circuits.
Random circuit sampling (RCS) remains one of the most competitive frameworks for demonstrating quantum advantage in near-term noisy intermediate-scale quantum (NISQ) hardware. Unfortunately, absent error-correction, existing benchmarks to characterize these experiments, like linear cross-entropy, have been classically spoofed due to noise. Because of this, there are interesting regimes, like shallow-depth random quantum circuits, where sampling is plausibly classically intractable, but no existing benchmark can distinguish between a noisy quantum computer and an adversarial classical spoofer. In this paper, we demonstrate that the nonlinear cross-entropy provides a sample-efficient benchmark for shallow-depth all-to-all random quantum circuits whose score cleanly separates noisy quantum computers from state-of-the-art classical spoofers, even in the presence of depolarizing noise. Further, we develop a binary classifier based on the notion of heavy output generation that features logarithmic sample complexity at short depth. Our evidence comes from exact analytic expressions for all-to-all Brownian circuit ensembles derived using replica tricks, and numerical simulations that corroborate these results for discrete Haar-random unitary circuits.