Grover's algorithm achieves a quadratic speedup for unstructured search when a global oracle for the target set is available. However, its success probability is generally below $100\%$. To overcome this issue, Long presented a modified version of Grover's search algorithm by introducing a phase-matching condition, which can search for the target set with zero theoretical failure rate. Nevertheless, in many applications, the target set is determined by the intersection of multiple constrained sets. Most existing Grover-based methods are limited to the intersection of only two sets and are not always successful in searching for the target set. In this work, based on Long's method, we propose an algorithm for exactly searching the intersection of multiple sets. We derive and prove a phase-matching condition for searching the intersection exactly. Furthermore, we present a quantum circuit that implements exact intersection search. Finally, we support our theoretical results with numerical simulations.
Grover's algorithm achieves a quadratic speedup for unstructured search when a global oracle for the target set is available. However, its success probability is generally below 100%. To overcome this issue, Long presented a modified version of Grover's search algorithm by introducing a phase-matching condition, which can search for the target set with zero theoretical failure rate. Nevertheless, in many applications, the target set is determined by the intersection of multiple constrained sets. Most existing Grover-based methods are limited to the intersection of only two sets and are not always successful in searching for the target set. In this work, based on Long's method, we propose an algorithm for exactly searching the intersection of multiple sets. We derive and prove a phase-matching condition for searching the intersection exactly. Furthermore, we present a quantum circuit that implements exact intersection search. Finally, we support our theoretical results with numerical simulations.
Grover's algorithm provides a quadratic speedup for searching unstructured databases and is traditionally implemented with qubits in Hilbert spaces whose dimensions are powers of two. With the advent of quantum platforms utilizing qudits---quantum systems with more than two levels---there is a need to generalize Grover search to these architectures, including heterogeneous systems with qudits of varying dimensions. Here, we present a unified framework for qudit-based Grover search, detailing the construction of oracles and diffusion operators with and without ancilla qubits and generalizing deterministic and fixed-point search variants that ensure exact or bounded success probabilities. We analyze phase-matching techniques and provide explicit circuit decompositions suitable for diverse hardware platforms. We also compare the corresponding trajectories on the Bloch sphere to provide an intuitive visualization of how the different phase choices amplify the target state. These results facilitate flexible, hardware-oriented protocols for implementing Grover search on qudit processors, potentially reducing circuit depth and enhancing success probabilities, thereby offering a practical toolkit for quantum computation and sensing applications leveraging multilevel quantum systems.
Grover's search algorithm has attracted great attention due to its quadratic speedup over classical algorithms in unsorted database search problems. However, Grover's algorithm is inefficient in multi-target search problems, except in the case of 1/4 of the data in the database satisfying the search conditions. Long presented a modified version of Grover's search algorithm by introducing a phase-matching condition that can search for the target state with a zero theoretical failure rate. In this work, we present an optimized exact multi-target search algorithm based on the modified Grover's algorithm by transforming the canonical diffusion operator to a more efficient diffusion operator, which can solve the multi-target search problem with a 100% success rate while requiring fewer gate counts and shallower circuit depth. After that, the optimized multi-target algorithm for four different items, including 2-qubit with 2 targets, 5-qubit with 2 targets, 5-qubit with 4 targets, and 6-qubit with 3 targets, are implemented on MindSpore framework. The experimental results show that, compared with Grover's algorithm and the modified Grover's algorithm, the proposed algorithm can reduce the quantum gate count by at least 21.1% and the depth of the quantum circuit by at least 11.4% and maintain a 100% success probability. Our code are available at https://github.com/mindsporelab/models/tree/master/research/arxiv_papers/GROVER-OP. Thanks for the support provided by MindSpore Community.
Grover's algorithm achieves a quadratic speedup for unstructured search given a global oracle for the target set. In many applications, however, the target set is specified as the intersection of multiple constraint sets. Constructing a global oracle for the intersection can be costly, whereas the individual constraint oracles are often much simpler to implement.
We study a randomized Grover search algorithm that directly uses these constraint oracles. At each iteration, one of the corresponding Grover operators is selected at random. For the two-operator case with uniform sampling, we prove that the success probability approaches one after Θ(4πrN) iterations, where r is the size of the intersection. Thus, the algorithm achieves the same asymptotic query complexity as standard Grover search but without requiring a global oracle. We then generalize the analysis to arbitrary sampling distributions and an arbitrary number of Grover operators through an auxiliary operator that approximates the expected Grover evolution, while retaining the same asymptotic complexity. We further show that highly biased sampling distributions can still achieve near-unit success probability, enabling cheaper Grover operators to be used more frequently. Finally, we prove asymptotic optimality and support the theoretical results with numerical simulations.
Abstract Grover's algorithm provides a quadratic speedup over classical algorithms to search for marked elements in an unstructured database. The original algorithm is probabilistic, returning a marked element with bounded error. When it is known beforehand there are M marked elements in N elements, there exist several schemes to achieve the exact version that returns a marked element with certainty, by using the generalized Grover's iteration G(α, β) := Sr(β) So(α), where the phase oracle So(α) multiplies a marked state by eiα, and the phase rotation Sr(β) multiplies the initial state |ψ0⟩ (an equal-superposition of all states) by e-iβ.However, in all the existing schemes the value range of α and β is limited; for instance, in the three early schemes α and β are determined by M/N. Thus, a natural question arises: Given the phase oracle So(α) with an arbitrary angle α, or the phase rotation Sr(β) with an arbitrary angle β, can we always construct an exact search algorithm without sacrificing the quadratic speedup advantage? The significance of this problem lies not only in the expansion of mathematical form, but also in its application value. We answer the question affirmatively, by presenting a search framework with adjustable parameters. Technically, we propose the fixed-axis-rotation (FXR) method where each iteration of the search algorithm can be geometrically seen as rotating about a fixed axis on the Bloch sphere. Furthermore, two applications of the proposed search framework are developed: the first is to learn exactly the secret string hidden by the Hamming distance oracle, and the other to solve the element distinctness promise problem deterministically. The two applications correspond to the two different cases where α or β is fixed respectively.
Quantum search is one of the most important algorithmic developments in quantum computing because it demonstrates how quantum principles can improve the efficiency of solving unstructured search problems. Grover’s algorithm provides a quadratic speed-up over classical linear search by reducing query complexity from O(N) to O(√N), where N represents the size of the search space. This review examines the principles, performance, and applications of Grover’s algorithm, with emphasis on its theoretical foundation and practical relevance. The discussion covers the roles of superposition, quantum interference, oracle operations, diffusion operators, and amplitude amplification in increasing the probability of measuring a desired solution. The manuscript also reviews the computational performance of quantum search in comparison with classical search methods and considers its relevance to database searching, combinatorial optimisation, cryptography, machine learning, bioinformatics, quantum chemistry, and materials science. The review highlights that Grover’s algorithm is not limited to database retrieval, as many computationally intensive problems can be reformulated as search or optimisation tasks. However, practical implementation remains constrained by current quantum hardware limitations, including decoherence, quantum noise, limited qubit availability, circuit depth, and the difficulty of designing efficient oracles. Despite these challenges, continuing progress in quantum hardware, error correction, cloud-based quantum platforms, and hybrid quantum-classical architectures suggests that quantum search will remain an important area of research. Overall, Grover’s algorithm represents a foundational quantum algorithm with significant theoretical value and potential long-term application in computational domains involving large and unstructured search spaces.
Grover's algorithm achieves a quadratic speedup over classical algorithms, but it is considered necessary to know the value of $\ensuremath{\lambda}$ exactly [Phys. Rev. Lett. 95, 150501 (2005); Phys. Rev. Lett. 113, 210501 (2014)], where $\ensuremath{\lambda}$ is the fraction of target items in the database. In this paper, we find out that the Grover algorithm can actually apply to the case where one can identify the range that $\ensuremath{\lambda}$ belongs to from a given series of disjoint ranges. However, Grover's algorithm still cannot maintain high success probability when there exist multiple target items. For this problem, we proposed a complementary-multiphase quantum search algorithm in which multiple phases complement each other so that the overall high success probability can be maintained. Compared to the existing algorithms, in the case defined above, our algorithm achieves the following three goals simultaneously: (1) the success probability can be no less than any given value between 0 and 1, (2) the algorithm is applicable to the entire range of $\ensuremath{\lambda}$, and (3) the number of iterations is almost the same as that of Grover's algorithm. Especially compared to the optimal fixed-point algorithm [Phys. Rev. Lett. 113, 210501 (2014)], our algorithm uses fewer iterations to achieve a success probability greater than 82.71%, e.g., when the minimum success probability is required to be 99.25%, the number of iterations can be reduced by 50%.