Approximating Turaev-Viro 3-manifold invariants is universal for quantum computation

The Turaev-Viro invariants are scalar topological invariants of compact, orientable 3-manifolds. We give a quantum algorithm for additively approximating Turaev-Viro invariants of a manifold presented by a Heegaard splitting. The algorithm is motivated by the relationship between topological quantum computers and (2+1)-D topological quantum field theories. Its accuracy is shown to be nontrivial, as the same algorithm, after efficient classical preprocessing, can solve any problem efficiently decidable by a quantum computer. Thus approximating certain Turaev-Viro invariants of manifolds presented by Heegaard splittings is a universal problem for quantum computation. This establishes a novel relation between the task of distinguishing non-homeomorphic 3-manifolds and the power of a general quantum computer.Comment: 4 pages, 3 figure

Admissible Colourings of 3-Manifold Triangulations for Turaev-Viro Type Invariants

Turaev-Viro invariants are amongst the most powerful tools to distinguish 3-manifolds. They are invaluable for mathematical software, but current algorithms to compute them rely on the enumeration of an extremely large set of combinatorial data defined on the triangulation, regardless of the underlying topology of the manifold. In the article, we propose a finer study of these combinatorial data, called admissible colourings, in relation with the cohomology of the manifold. We prove that the set of admissible colourings to be considered is substantially smaller than previously known, by furnishing new upper bounds on its size that are aware of the topology of the manifold. Moreover, we deduce new topology-sensitive enumeration algorithms based on these bounds. The paper provides a theoretical analysis, as well as a detailed experimental study of the approach. We give strong experimental evidence on large manifold censuses that our upper bounds are tighter than the previously known ones, and that our algorithms outperform significantly state of the art implementations to compute Turaev-Viro invariants

On the Treewidth of Triangulated 3-Manifolds

In graph theory, as well as in 3-manifold topology, there exist several width-type parameters to describe how "simple" or "thin" a given graph or 3-manifold is. These parameters, such as pathwidth or treewidth for graphs, or the concept of thin position for 3-manifolds, play an important role when studying algorithmic problems; in particular, there is a variety of problems in computational 3-manifold topology - some of them known to be computationally hard in general - that become solvable in polynomial time as soon as the dual graph of the input triangulation has bounded treewidth. In view of these algorithmic results, it is natural to ask whether every 3-manifold admits a triangulation of bounded treewidth. We show that this is not the case, i.e., that there exists an infinite family of closed 3-manifolds not admitting triangulations of bounded pathwidth or treewidth (the latter implies the former, but we present two separate proofs). We derive these results from work of Agol and of Scharlemann and Thompson, by exhibiting explicit connections between the topology of a 3-manifold M on the one hand and width-type parameters of the dual graphs of triangulations of M on the other hand, answering a question that had been raised repeatedly by researchers in computational 3-manifold topology. In particular, we show that if a closed, orientable, irreducible, non-Haken 3-manifold M has a triangulation of treewidth (resp. pathwidth) k then the Heegaard genus of M is at most 48(k+1) (resp. 4(3k+1))