A paradox in bosonic energy computations via semidefinite programming relaxations

We show that the recent hierarchy of semidefinite programming relaxations based on non-commutative polynomial optimization and reduced density matrix variational methods exhibits an interesting paradox when applied to the bosonic case: even though it can be rigorously proven that the hierarchy collapses after the first step, numerical implementations of higher order steps generate a sequence of improving lower bounds that converges to the optimal solution. We analyze this effect and compare it with similar behavior observed in implementations of semidefinite programming relaxations for commutative polynomial minimization. We conclude that the method converges due to the rounding errors occurring during the execution of the numerical program, and show that convergence is lost as soon as computer precision is incremented. We support this conclusion by proving that for any element p of a Weyl algebra which is non-negative in the Schrodinger representation there exists another element p' arbitrarily close to p that admits a sum of squares decomposition.Comment: 22 pages, 4 figure

Positivity results for the Hecke algebras of non-crystallographic finite Coxeter groups

This paper is a report on a computer check of some positivity properties of the Hecke algebra in type H4, including the non-negativity of the coefficients of the structure constants in the Kazhdan-Lusztig basis. This answers a long-standing question of Lusztig's. The same algorithm, carried out by hand, also allows us to deal with the case of dihedral Coxeter groups.Comment: septembre 2005; 13 pages; cet article s'accompagne d'un logicie

Quantum Query Algorithms are Completely Bounded Forms

We prove a characterization of $t$-query quantum algorithms in terms of the unit ball of a space of degree-$2t$ polynomials. Based on this, we obtain a refined notion of approximate polynomial degree that equals the quantum query complexity, answering a question of Aaronson et al. (CCC'16). Our proof is based on a fundamental result of Christensen and Sinclair (J. Funct. Anal., 1987) that generalizes the well-known Stinespring representation for quantum channels to multilinear forms. Using our characterization, we show that many polynomials of degree four are far from those coming from two-query quantum algorithms. We also give a simple and short proof of one of the results of Aaronson et al. showing an equivalence between one-query quantum algorithms and bounded quadratic polynomials.Comment: 24 pages, 3 figures. v2: 27 pages, minor changes in response to referee comment