Weakly Measured Loops for Quantum Amplitude Amplification: Oracle Savings and Adaptive Search with Unknown Target Probability

Abstract

We present a family of quantum amplitude amplification algorithms that interleave ordinary Grover rotations with tunable weak measurements in loops. A successful measurement yields the target state and stops the algorithm, while after a failure, the loop resumes from the post-measurement state without restarting. We express the leading costs in expected Grover iterations as $p \to 0$. For a known target probability $p$, an exact weak measurement-conditioned loop for states near the angle $π/4$ uses $(π/8+1/4+o(1))/\sqrt{p}$ iterations, improving on the standard Grover constant $π/4$ and on optimised restart Grover, and matching the corresponding infimum in our continuous-angle analysis. When only a lower bound $0 < p_0 \leq p < 1/2$ is available, a discrete Lyapunov equation gives the exact expected oracle cost for every fixed measurement strength and a closed-form optimal strength. Using the strength selected from $p_0$, the expected number of Grover iterations is at most $\frac{1}{2\sqrt{2}}(\frac{1}{\sqrt{p}}+\frac{1}{\sqrt{p_0}})$, where the expected cost decreases as the actual $p$ increases, and gives the leading constant $1/\sqrt{2}$ at the promise boundary $p = p_0$. For completely unknown $p$, we identify measurement strength $κ(t)=Θ(1/t)$ as the critical scale within the regular schedules considered here and analyse $κ_b(t)=\min\{1/2,b/t\}$. For each fixed $b > 2$, we rigorously derive a closed-form Gamma-function expression $C(b)$ giving $(C(b)/2+o(1))/\sqrt{p}$ expected iterations. Numerical minimisation of this explicit expression gives $b \approx 5.2$ and $C(b)/2 \approx 1.01$. The results show that weak measurements preserve the $Θ(1/\sqrt{p})$ search scale while adding an explicit fixed-point control mechanism and provable oracle savings.