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arXiv:quant-ph/0703082

On the Quantum Circuit Complexity Equivalence

Milosh Drezgich, Shankar Sastry

Published Mar 9, 2007• 1 citation
arXivHTMLPDF

Abstract

Nielsen \cite{Nielsen05} recently asked the following question: "What is the minimal size quantum circuit required to exactly implement a specified $% \mathit{n}$-qubit unitary operation $U$, without the use of ancilla qubits?" Nielsen was able to prove that a lower bound on the minimal size circuit is provided by the length of the geodesic between the identity $I$ and $U$, where the length is defined by a suitable Finsler metric on $SU(2^{n})$. We prove that the minimum circuit size that simulates $U$ is in linear relation with the geodesic length and simulation parameters, for the given Finsler structure $F$. As a corollary we prove the highest lower bound of $O(\frac{% n^{4}}{p}d_{F_{p}}^{2}(I,U)L_{F_{p}}(I,\tilde{U})) $and the lowest upper bound of $Ω(n^{4}d_{F_{p}}^{3}(I,U))$, for the standard simulation technique. Therefore, our results show that by standard simulation one can not expect a better then $n^{2}$ times improvement in the upper bound over the result from Nielsen, Dowling, Gu and Doherty \cite{Nielsen06}. Moreover, our equivalence result can be applied to the arbitrary path on the manifold including the one that is generated adiabatically.

DOI
10.48550/arxiv.quant-ph/0703082

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What is the minimal size quantum circuit required to exactly implement a specified n-qubit unitary operation, U, without the use of ancilla qubits? We show that a lower bound on the minimal size is provided by the length of the minimal geodesic between U and the identity, I, where length is defined by a suitable Finsler metric on the manifold SU(2^n). The geodesic curves on these manifolds have the striking property that once an initial position and velocity are set, the remainder of the geodesic is completely determined by a second order differential equation known as the geodesic equation. This is in contrast with the usual case in circuit design, either classical or quantum, where being given part of an optimal circuit does not obviously assist in the design of the rest of the circuit. Geodesic analysis thus offers a potentially powerful approach to the problem of proving quantum circuit lower bounds. In this paper we construct several Finsler metrics whose minimal length geodesics provide lower bounds on quantum circuit size. For each Finsler metric we give a procedure to compute the corresponding geodesic equation. We also construct a large class of solutions to the geodesic equation, which we call \emph{Pauli geodesics}, since they arise from isometries generated by the Pauli group. For any unitary U diagonal in the computational basis, we show that: (a) provided the minimal length geodesic is unique, it must be a Pauli geodesic; (b) finding the length of the minimal Pauli geodesic passing from I to U is equivalent to solving an exponential size instance of the closest vector in a lattice problem (CVP); and (c) all but a doubly exponentially small fraction of such unitaries have minimal Pauli geodesics of exponential length.
Recently, Nielsen et al have proposed a geometric approach to quantum computation. They've shown that the size of the minimum quantum circuits implementing a unitary U, up to polynomial factors, equals to the length of minimal geodesic from identity I through U. They've investigated a large class of solutions to the geodesic equation, called Pauli geodesics. They've raised a natural question whether we can explicitly construct a family of unitaries U that have exponentially long minimal length Pauli geodesics? We give a positive answer to this question.
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Determining the quantum circuit complexity of a unitary operation is closely related to the problem of finding minimal length paths in a particular curved geometry [Nielsen et al, Science 311, 1133-1135 (2006)]. This paper investigates many of the basic geometric objects associated to this space, including the Levi-Civita connection, the geodesic equation, the curvature, and the Jacobi equation. We show that the optimal Hamiltonian evolution for synthesis of a desired unitary necessarily obeys a simple universal geodesic equation. As a consequence, once the initial value of the Hamiltonian is set, subsequent changes to the Hamiltonian are completely determined by the geodesic equation. We develop many analytic solutions to the geodesic equation, and a set of invariants that completely determine the geodesics. We investigate the problem of finding minimal geodesics through a desired unitary, U, and develop a procedure which allows us to deform the (known) geodesics of a simple and well understood metric to the geodesics of the metric of interest in quantum computation. This deformation procedure is illustrated using some three-qubit numerical examples. We study the computational complexity of evaluating distances on Riemmanian manifolds, and show that no efficient classical algorithm for this problem exists, subject to the assumption that good pseudorandom generators exist. Finally, we develop a canonical extension procedure for unitary operations which allows ancilla qubits to be incorporated into the geometric approach to quantum computing.
A central question in quantum information theory is the circuit complexity of states arising from standard many-body models. We study this question for quantum ppp-spin glasses, random Hamiltonians whose interactions act on ppp-tuples of qubits through Pauli strings. Anschuetz, Gamarnik, and Kiani (arXiv:2404.07231) showed that the optimum energy is separated from the best energy achievable by product states. This leaves open whether shallow circuits can close the gap, since even depth-one circuits can generate entanglement. We show that the entanglement needed to close the product-state gap cannot be generated at shallow depth. When the average interaction degree grows with nnn, we prove that, for all sufficiently large fixed ppp, any circuit preparing an nnn-qubit state whose normalized energy is within a fixed positive constant of the optimum must have depth Ωp(log⁡n)Ω_p(\log n)Ωp​(logn). In the bounded-average-degree regime, we prove a fixed-depth obstruction: for every fixed DDD, a sufficiently large degree prefactor rules out depth-DDD preparation of near-ground states. Both results hold uniformly over circuits with an arbitrary number of ancilla qubits. Our results give an obstruction in the spirit of the No Low-Energy Trivial States problem of Freedman and Hastings (arXiv:1301.1363), but for random quantum spin glasses rather than code-based Hamiltonians such as those of Anshu, Breuckmann, and Nirkhe (arXiv:2206.13228), whose ground states admit polynomial-size preparation circuits. This setting opens a probabilistic route to NLTS-like questions: we recast state-preparation lower bounds for random quantum Hamiltonians as uniform control of Gaussian processes indexed by shallow circuits.