The hardness to solve an unstructured quantum search problem by a standard quantum search algorithm mainly originates from the low efficiency to amplify the amplitude of the marked state by the oracle unitary operation associated with other known quantum operations. In order to bypass the square speedup limitation of a standard quantum search algorithm it is necessary to develop other type of quantum search algorithms. It is described in detail in the paper for a quantum dynamical method to solve the quantum search problems in the cyclic group state space. The binary dynamical representation for a quantum state in the Hilbert space of the n-qubit quantum system is generalized to the multi-base dynamical representation for a quantum state in the cyclic group state space. Thus, any quantum state in the cyclic group state space may be described completely in terms of a set of dynamical parameters that are closely related to the symmetric property and structure of the cyclic group. The quantum search problem therefore could be solved by determining the set of dynamical parameters that describe completely the unknown marked state of the search problem instead by directly measuring the marked state which is a necessary step in the standard quantum search algorithm. An unstructured quantum search problem in the Hilbert space is inevitably affected greatly by the symmetric property and structure of a group. The main attempt of the paper is to make use of the symmetric properties and structures of groups to help solving the quantum search problems in the group state spaces. It is shown how the quantum search process could be reduced from the cyclic group state space to these cyclic group state subspaces with the help of the symmetric property and structure of the cyclic group on a universal quantum computer.
The hardness to solve an unstructured quantum search problem by a standard quantum search algorithm mainly originates from the low efficiency to amplify the amplitude of the marked state by the oracle unitary operation associated with other known quantum operations. In order to bypass the square speedup limitation of a standard quantum search algorithm it is necessary to develop other type of quantum search algorithms. It is described in detail in the paper for a quantum dynamical method to solve the quantum search problems in the cyclic group state space. The binary dynamical representation for a quantum state in the Hilbert space of the n-qubit quantum system is generalized to the multi-base dynamical representation for a quantum state in the cyclic group state space. Thus, any quantum state in the cyclic group state space may be described completely in terms of a set of dynamical parameters that are closely related to the symmetric property and structure of the cyclic group. The quantum search problem therefore could be solved by determining the set of dynamical parameters that describe completely the unknown marked state of the search problem instead by directly measuring the marked state which is a necessary step in the standard quantum search algorithm. An unstructured quantum search problem in the Hilbert space is inevitably affected greatly by the symmetric property and structure of a group. The main attempt of the paper is to make use of the symmetric properties and structures of groups to help solving the quantum search problems in the group state spaces. It is shown how the quantum search process could be reduced from the cyclic group state space to these cyclic group state subspaces with the help of the symmetric property and structure of the cyclic group on a universal quantum computer.
A proposed quantum-computing algorithm would perform a search for an item of information in a database stored in a Hilbert-space memory structure. The algorithm is intended to make it possible to search relatively quickly through a large database under conditions in which available computing resources would otherwise be considered inadequate to perform such a task. The algorithm would apply, more specifically, to a relational database in which information would be stored in a set of N complex orthonormal vectors, each of N dimensions (where N can be exponentially large). Each vector would constitute one row of a unitary matrix, from which one would derive the Hamiltonian operator (and hence the evolutionary operator) of a quantum system. In other words, all the stored information would be mapped onto a unitary operator acting on a quantum state that would represent the item of information to be retrieved. Then one could exploit quantum parallelism: one could pose all search queries simultaneously by performing a quantum measurement on the system. In so doing, one would effectively solve the search problem in one computational step. One could exploit the direct- and inner-product decomposability of the unitary matrix to make the dimensionality of the memory space exponentially large by use of only linear resources. However, inasmuch as the necessary preprocessing (the mapping of the stored information into a Hilbert space) could be exponentially expensive, the proposed algorithm would likely be most beneficial in applications in which the resources available for preprocessing were much greater than those available for searching.
We develop three new quantum algorithms for searching the desired target state in the unstructured database of size N. The first algorithm requires Log N iterative steps. It constructs two quantum bags of equal size in terms of two quantum states, out of which exactly one quantum state will have nonzero overlap with the target state. This determination of overlap is done by taking the inner product, in Log N time [2], of the implicitly known target state with any one of these two quantum states. The second algorithm requires just one single step which uses a new suitable operator and the choice of this operator is problem dependent, i.e. it depends upon the number of qubits required to be used to represent an element in the index set. The third algorithm again requires only a single step and this algorithm makes use of a fixed (same) operator. It is known that algorithm for unstructured database search can be easily adaptable for solving NP-Complete problems. However, the computational complexity of NP-Complete problems after the adaptations of both the classical as well as quantum [1] search algorithms remains of the exponential order as the exponent for quantum [1] algorithm changes only to one-half times the exponent for classical algorithm. But for our quantum algorithms the exponent falls substantially so that our new quantum algorithms for unstructured search are capable if reducing the computational complexity of NP-Complete problems to polynomial order!
IntroductionFor a search problem associated with a unsorted database, the remarkable Grover's quantum algorithm (1) provides a quadratic speedup over its classical counterpart.The search problem can be described as follows: for a given function f , there exists one unknown element in the set {0, 1, ..., N -1} that satisfies f (x)=-1, say x = τ, whereas the other N -1o n e sg i v e f (x)=1.How many times of evaluations of f are required to determine the element τ for f (τ)=-1?Through a conventional algorithm, one needs O(N) trials to achieve this aim.How about the utility of quantum algorithm for the search?For the scenario in the quantum world, the search problem can be rephrased in the quantum mechanical language: for a given unitary operator I τ , that is sometimes called the oracle operator, and a set of state vectors (orthonormal basis): s = {|0 , |1 , ..., |N -1 }, I τ |x = |x for all states in the set except I τ |x = -|x for x = τ.H owma n yqueriesofI τ are required to determine |τ ?By Grover's algorithm, one needs only O( √ N) quantum mechanical steps to find the marked state |τ out.It has been shown that Grover's algorithm is optimal since it needs minimal oracle calls to perform a quantum search (2).The quantum searching process will be briefly reviewed as follows.The first step of Grover's algorithm is to prepare a superposition state of all elements with uniform probability amplitude:Then apply the Grover kernel G = -I η I τ to |s ,w h er eI η is a unitary operator and contains no bias against the marked state.For large N,a f t e ra b o u tm = π √ N/4 repetitions of G operations, the probability to observe |τ is close to one, i.e., G m |s ∼ |τ .( 2 ) Since every single G involves one query of I τ ,onlyO( √ N) searching steps are required for a quantum search task.In what follows, we will first investigate on the general SU(2) formulation for the kernel of Grover's searching operator G.The discussions of quantum searching certainty, robustness, and the analog analogue version of the Grover's algorithm will be given afterwards.
The search for practical problems that can be solved exponentially faster on a quantum computer is one of the primary goals in research into algorithms for quantum computers. It has long been known that such speedups are only possible for highly structured problems.
We consider two problems with algebraic structure: (1) the hidden subgroup problem, where we have an unknown subgroup, a function that is constant on cosets of the subgroup, and the task is to find the unknown subgroup; (2) the hidden shift problem, where we have an unknown element of a group, a function that has been shifted by that group element, and the task is to find the unknown group element.
We show that the Fourier transform is intimately connected to both these problems. This is because the Fourier transform respects group symmetries.
For the hidden subgroup problem, we introduce the idea of using information theoretic techniques to design quantum algorithms. This consists of first finding an optimal set of measurements for distinguishing between different subgroups, followed by attempts to implement this set of measurements.
We show that the standard algorithm for the abelian hidden subgroup problem is optimal. For the nonabelian hidden subgroup problem, the optimal measurements respect the Fourier transform in that they can be implemented by first performing a Fourier transform on each coset state, measuring the name of the irreducible representation for each state, followed by a joint measurement over the resulting lower dimensional space. This shows that the “strong standard method” cannot be used to implement the optimal set of measurements.
For some instances of the hidden shift problem, we give a quantum algorithms that are exponentially faster than the best known classical algorithm. The algorithms make use of the Fourier transform in a way that may be interpreted as solving a deconvolution problem. As evidence of hardness, we give a reduction from algebraically homomorphic cryptosystems to the shifted Legendre symbol problem. This is an example of a problem which admits an exponential quantum speedup yet is not an instance of the abelian hidden subgroup problem.
The multiple-quantum operator algebra formalism has been exploited to construct generally an unsorted quantum search algorithm. The exponential propagator and its corresponding effective Hamiltonian are constructed explicitly that describe in quantum mechanics the time evolution of a multi- particle two-state quantum system from the initial state to the output of the unsorted quantum search problem. The exponential propagator usually may not be compatible with the mathematical structure and principle of the search problem and hence is not a real quantum search network, but it can be further decomposed into a product of a series of the oracle unitary operations such as the selective phase-shift operations and the nonselective unitary operations which can be expressed further as a sequence of elementary building blocks such as one-qubit quantum gates and the two-qubit diagonal phase gates, resulting in that the decomposed propagator is compatible with the mathematical structure and principle of the search problem and thus, becomes a real quantum search network. The decomposition for the propagator can be achieved with the help of the operator algebra structure and symmetry of the effective Hamiltonian, and the properties of the multiple-quantum operator algebra spaces, especially the characteristic transformation behavior of the multiple-quantum operators under the z-axis rotations. It has been shown that the computational complexity of the search algorithm is dependent upon that of the numerical multidimensional integration and hence it is believed that the search algorithm could solve efficiently the unsorted search problem. An NMR device is also proposed to solve efficiently the unsorted search problem in polynomial time.
The study of quantum computation has been motivated by the hope of finding efficient quantum algorithms for solving classically hard problems. In this context, quantum algorithms by local adiabatic evolution have been shown to solve an unstructured search problem with a quadratic speedup over a classical search, just as Grover's algorithm. In this paper, we study how the structure of the search problem may be exploited to further improve the efficiency of these quantum adiabatic algorithms. We show that by nesting a partial search over a reduced set of variables into a global search, it is possible to devise quantum adiabatic algorithms with a complexity that, although still exponential, grows with a reduced order in the problem size.