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arXiv:2604.05660 · Advanced Quantum Technologies

Coherence and Imaginarity as Resources in Quantum Circuit Complexity

Linlin Ye, Zhaoqi Wu, Nanrun Zhou

quant-phSubmitted Apr 7, 2026• Announced Apr 8, 2026• 6 citations
arXivHTMLPDF

Abstract

Quantum circuit complexity quantifies the minimal number of gates needed to realize a unitary transformation and plays a central role in quantum computation. In this work, we investigate the complexity of quantum circuits through coherence and imaginarity resources. We establish a lower bound on the circuit cost by the Tsallis relative $α$ entropy of cohering power, which is shown to be tighter than the one presented by Bu et al.[\textit{Communications in Mathematical Physics} 405, no. 7 (2024):161] under restrictive conditions. As a consequence, we obtain the relationships between the circuit cost and the coherence generating power via probabilistic average in terms of skew information/relative entropy, and present explicit bounds of the circuit cost for typical quantum gates. Moreover, we derive lower bounds on the circuit cost via the imaginaring power of the circuit, induced by the Tsallis relative $α$ entropy and relative entropy. We demonstrate that imaginarity can yield nontrivial constraints on the circuit cost even when coherence-based lower bounds are zero (e.g., for the $T$ gate), which implies that imaginarity may provide advantages under certain circumstances compared with coherence. Our results may help better understand the connections between quantum resources and circuit complexity.

Journal reference
Advanced Quantum Technologies, 2026, 9(4): e01007
DOI
10.1002/qute.202501007
Comments
29 pages, 2 figures

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Quantum circuit complexity quantifies the minimal number of gates needed to realize a unitary transformation and plays a central role in quantum computation. In this work, we investigate the complexity of quantum circuits through coherence and imaginarity resources. We establish a lower bound on the circuit cost by the Tsallis relative ααα entropy of cohering power, which is shown to be tighter than the one presented by Bu et al.[\textit{Communications in Mathematical Physics} 405, no. 7 (2024):161] under restrictive conditions. As a consequence, we obtain the relationships between the circuit cost and the coherence generating power via probabilistic average in terms of skew information/relative entropy, and present explicit bounds of the circuit cost for typical quantum gates. Moreover, we derive lower bounds on the circuit cost via the imaginaring power of the circuit, induced by the Tsallis relative ααα entropy and relative entropy. We demonstrate that imaginarity can yield nontrivial constraints on the circuit cost even when coherence-based lower bounds are zero (e.g., for the TTT gate), which implies that imaginarity may provide advantages under certain circumstances compared with coherence. Our results may help better understand the connections between quantum resources and circuit complexity.
Notions of circuit complexity and cost play a key role in quantum computing and simulation where they capture the (weighted) minimal number of gates that is required to implement a unitary. Similar notions also become increasingly prominent in high energy physics in the study of holography. While notions of entanglement have in general little implications for the quantum circuit complexity and the cost of a unitary, in this work, we discuss a simple such relationship when both the entanglement of a state and the cost of a unitary take small values, building on ideas on how values of entangling power of quantum gates add up. This bound implies that if entanglement entropies grow linearly in time, so does the cost. The implications are twofold: It provides insights into complexity growth for short times. In the context of quantum simulation, it allows us to compare digital and analog quantum simulators. The main technical contribution is a continuous-variable small incremental entangling bound.
Abstract Given a unitary transformation, what is the size of the smallest quantum circuit that implements it? This quantity, known as the quantum circuit complexity, is a fundamental property of quantum evolutions that has widespread applications in many fields, including quantum computation, quantum field theory, and black hole physics. In this paper, we obtain a new lower bound for the quantum circuit complexity in terms of a novel complexity measure that we propose for quantum circuits, which we call the quantum Wasserstein complexity. Our proposed measure is based on the quantum Wasserstein distance of order one (also called the quantum earth mover’s distance), a metric on the space of quantum states. We also prove several fundamental and important properties of our new complexity measure, which stand to be of independent interest. Finally, we show that our new measure also provides a lower bound for the experimental cost of implementing quantum circuits, which implies a quantum limit on converting quantum resources to computational resources. Our results provide novel applications of the quantum Wasserstein distance and pave the way for a deeper understanding of the resources needed to implement a quantum computation.
Abstract Since both coherence and imaginarity have proven to be fundamental resources in quantum information processing and their definitions are both relative to a given basis, it is natural to investigate the conversion between them. In this work, we prove that a quantum state can be transformed into a state with nonvanishing imaginarity resource by incoherent operations if and only if it has nonvanishing coherence resource. On the other hand, we demonstrate that a quantum state can be transformed into a state with vanishing coherence resource by orthogonal operations if and only if it has vanishing imaginarity resource. Based on these results, we show that for any imaginarity measure, a corresponding coherence measure can be defined as the maximal amount of imaginarity generated by incoherent operations, and that for any coherence quantifier, a corresponding imaginarity quantifier can be defined as the minimal coherence generated by orthogonal operations.
The quantum speed limit sets a fundamental restriction on the evolution time of quantum systems. We explore the relationship between quantum imaginarity and the quantum speed limit by utilizing measures such as relative entropy, trace distance, and geometric imaginarity. These speed limits define the fundamental constraints on the minimum time necessary for quantum systems to evolve under various dynamical processes. As applications the dephasing dynamics and dissipative dynamics are analyzed in detail. The quantum speed limit in stochastic-approximate transformations is also investigated. Our quantum speed limits provide lower bounds on how fast a physical system evolves to attain or lose certain imaginarity, with potential applications in efficient quantum computation designs, quantum control and quantum sensing.
Quantum complexity measures the difficulty of realizing a quantum process, such as preparing a state or implementing a unitary. We present an approach to quantifying the thermodynamic resources required to implement a process if the process’s complexity is restricted. We focus on the prototypical task of information erasure, or Landauer erasure, wherein an n -qubit memory is reset to the all-zero state. We show that the minimum thermodynamic work required to reset an arbitrary state in our model, via a complexity-constrained process, is quantified by the state’s . The complexity entropy therefore quantifies a trade-off between the work cost and complexity cost of resetting a state. If the qubits have a nontrivial (but product) Hamiltonian, the optimal work cost is determined by the . The complexity entropy quantifies the amount of randomness a system appears to have to a computationally limited observer. Similarly, the complexity relative entropy quantifies such an observer’s ability to distinguish two states. We prove elementary properties of the complexity (relative) entropy. In a random circuit—a simple model for quantum chaotic dynamics—the complexity entropy transitions from zero to its maximal value around the time corresponding to the observer’s computational-power limit. Also, we identify information-theoretic applications of the complexity entropy. The complexity entropy quantifies the resources required for data compression if the compression algorithm must use a restricted number of gates. We further introduce a , which arises naturally in a complexity-constrained variant of information-theoretic decoupling. Assuming that this entropy obeys a conjectured chain rule, we show that the entropy bounds the number of qubits that one can decouple from a reference system, as judged by a computationally bounded referee. Overall, our framework extends the resource-theoretic approach to thermodynamics to integrate a notion of , as quantified by .
Imaginarity, stemming from the complex structure of quantum mechanics, has recently emerged as a fundamental resource, yet its dynamical generation remains largely unexplored. In this work, we introduce the notion of imaginarity-generating power (IGP) of unitary dynamics, which quantifies the ability of unitary operations to produce imaginarity from initially real quantum states. To quantify imaginarity, we employ a measure based on the Hilbert--Schmidt norm, which we show to be monotone under real unital operations. Within the framework of dynamical resource theories, we derive an exact expression for the purity-constrained IGP in arbitrary dimensions and show that, for pure real input states, it depends solely on intrinsic and experimentally accessible properties of the unitary. We further analyze its average behavior over ensembles of states with varying purity under both uniform and Hilbert--Schmidt distributions. We prove that it satisfies the essential properties of a valid resource monotone within the dynamical resource theory of imaginarity. We also characterize the unitaries that maximize the IGP and determine the corresponding bounds. Moreover, for Haar-random unitaries, we show that the IGP concentrates near its maximal value in high dimensions with small fluctuations, indicating that typical high-dimensional quantum dynamics are highly effective at generating imaginarity.