In our thesis, we try to shed more light onto the complexity of quantum complexity classes by refining the related part of the hierarchy. First, we review the basic concepts of quantum computing in general. Then, inspired by BQP, we define new complexity classes. They are placed between BPP and PSPACE. We show that they incorporate the current important quantum algorithms. Furthermore, the importance of the unitarity constraint given by quantum mechanics is revealed. Without this requirement, we naturally arrive at the class AWPP, which was up to now thought to be just an artificially defined class. We hope that some of our newly defined classes could find their use in proving results about BQP.
In our thesis, we try to shed more light onto the complexity of quantum complexity classes by refining the related part of the hierarchy. First, we review the basic concepts of quantum computing in general. Then, inspired by BQP, we define new complexity classes. They are placed between BPP and PSPACE. We show that they incorporate the current important quantum algorithms. Furthermore, the importance of the unitarity constraint given by quantum mechanics is revealed. Without this requirement, we naturally arrive at the class AWPP, which was up to now thought to be just an artificially defined class. We hope that some of our newly defined classes could find their use in proving results about BQP.
We present a new quantum complexity class, called MQ^2, which is contained in AWPP. This class has a compact and simple mathematical definition, involving only polynomial-time computable functions and a unitarity condition. It contains both Deutsch-Jozsa's and Shor's algorithm, while its relation to BQP is unknown. This shows that in the complexity class hierarchy, BQP is not an extraordinary isolated island, but has ''siblings'' which as well can solve prime-factorization.
Abstract. In this paper we study quantum computation from a complexity theoretic viewpoint. Our rst result is the existence of an ecient universal quantum Turing machine in Deutsch’s model of a quantum Turing machine (QTM) [Proc. Roy. Soc. London Ser. A, 400 (1985), pp. 97{117]. This construction is substantially more complicated than the corresponding construction for classical Turing machines (TMs); in fact, even simple primitives such as looping, branching, and composition are not straightforward in the context of quantum Turing machines. We establish how these familiar primitives can be implemented and introduce some new, purely quantum mechanical primitives, such as changing the computational basis and carrying out an arbitrary unitary transformation of polynomially bounded dimension. We also consider the precision to which the transition amplitudes of a quantum Turing machine need to be specied. We prove that O(log T) bits of precision suce to support a T step computation. This justies the claim that the quantum Turing machine model should be regarded as a discrete model of computation and not an analog one. We give the rst formal evidence that quantum Turing machines violate the modern (complexity theoretic) formulation of the Church{Turing thesis. We show the existence of a problem, relative to an oracle, that can be solved in polynomial time on a quantum Turing machine, but requires superpolynomial time on a bounded-error probabilistic Turing machine, and thus not in the class BPP. The class BQP of languages that are eciently decidable (with small error-probability) on a quantum Turing machine satises BPP ⊆ BQP ⊆ P]P. Therefore, there is no possibility of giving a mathematical proof that quantum Turing machines are more powerful than classical probabilistic Turing machines (in the unrelativized setting) unless there is a major breakthrough in complexity theory.
AWPP is a complexity class introduced by Fenner, Fortnow, Kurtz, and Li, which is defined using GapP functions. Although it is an important class as the best upperbound of BQP, its definition seems to be somehow artificial, and therefore it would be better if we have some “physical interpretation” of AWPP. Here we provide a quantum physical interpretation of AWPP: we show that AWPP is equal to the class of problems efficiently solved by a quantum computer with the ability of postselecting an event whose probability is close to an FP function. This result is applied to also obtain a quantum physical interpretation of APP. In addition, we consider a “classical physical analogue” of these results, and show that a restricted version of BPPpath contains UP ∩ coUP and is contained in WAPP.
Alright, so now we've got this beautiful theory of quantum mechanics, and the possibly-even-more-beautiful theory of computational complexity. Clearly, with two theories this beautiful, you can't just let them stay single – you have to set them up, see if they hit it off, etc. And that brings us to the class BQP : Bounded-Error Quantum Polynomial-Time. We talked in Chapter 7 about BPP , or Bounded-Error Probabilistic Polynomial-Time. Informally, BPP is the class of computational problems that are efficiently solvable in the physical world if classical physics is true. Now we ask, what problems are efficiently solvable in the physical world if (as seems more likely) quantum physics is true? To me it’s sort of astounding that it took until the 1990s for anyone to really seriously ask this question, given that all the tools for asking it were in place by the 1960s or even earlier. It makes you wonder, what similarly obvious questions are there today that no one’s asking?
Quantum computing involving physical systems with continuous degrees of freedom, such as the quantum states of light, has recently attracted significant interest. However, a well-defined quantum complexity theory for these bosonic computations over infinite-dimensional Hilbert spaces is missing. In this work, we lay foundations for such a research program. We introduce natural complexity classes and problems based on bosonic generalizations of BQP, the local Hamiltonian problem, and QMA. We uncover several relationships and subtle differences between standard Boolean classical and discrete variable quantum complexity classes and identify outstanding open problems. In particular: 1. We show that the power of quadratic (Gaussian) quantum dynamics is equivalent to the class BQL. More generally, we define classes of continuous-variable quantum polynomial time computations with a bounded probability of error based on higher-degree gates. Due to the infinite dimensional Hilbert space, it is not a priori clear whether a decidable upper bound can be obtained for these classes. We identify complete problems for these classes and demonstrate a BQP lower and EXPSPACE upper bound. We further show that the problem of computing expectation values of polynomial bosonic observables is in PSPACE. 2. We prove that the problem of deciding the boundedness of the spectrum of a bosonic Hamiltonian is co-NP-hard. Furthermore, we show that the problem of finding the minimum energy of a bosonic Hamiltonian critically depends on the non-Gaussian stellar rank of the family of energy-constrained states one optimizes over: for constant stellar rank, it is NP-complete; for polynomially-bounded rank, it is in QMA; for unbounded rank, it is undecidable.
Quantum computing is a prolific research area, halfway between physics and computer science [27, 29, 52]. Most likely, its origins may be dated back to 70's, when some works on quantum information began to appear (see, e.g., [34, 37]). In early 80's, R.P. Feynman suggested that the computational power of quantum mechanical processes might be beyond that of traditional computation models [25]. Almost at the same time, P. Benioff already proved that such processes are at least as powerful as Turing machines [9]. In 1985, D. Deutsch [22] proposed the notion of a quantum Turing machine as a physically realizable model for a quantum computer. From the point of view of structural complexity, E. Bernstein and U. Vazirani introduced in [20] the class BQP of problems solvable in polynomial time on quantum Turing machines, focusing attention on relations with the corresponding deterministic and probabilistic classes P and BPP, respectively. Several works in the literature explored classical issues in complexity theory from the quantum paradigm perspective (see, e.g., [7, 60, 61]).