On the power quantum computation over real Hilbert spaces

We consider the power of various quantum complexity classes with the restriction that states and operators are defined over a real, rather than complex, Hilbert space. It is well know that a quantum circuit over the complex numbers can be transformed into a quantum circuit over the real numbers with the addition of a single qubit. This implies that BQP retains its power when restricted to using states and operations over the reals. We show that the same is true for QMA(k), QIP(k), QMIP, and QSZK.Comment: Significant improvements from previous version, in particular showing both containments (eg. QMA_R is in QMA and vice versa

Faithful Squashed Entanglement

Squashed entanglement is a measure for the entanglement of bipartite quantum states. In this paper we present a lower bound for squashed entanglement in terms of a distance to the set of separable states. This implies that squashed entanglement is faithful, that is, strictly positive if and only if the state is entangled. We derive the bound on squashed entanglement from a bound on quantum conditional mutual information, which is used to define squashed entanglement and corresponds to the amount by which strong subadditivity of von Neumann entropy fails to be saturated. Our result therefore sheds light on the structure of states that almost satisfy strong subadditivity with equality. The proof is based on two recent results from quantum information theory: the operational interpretation of the quantum mutual information as the optimal rate for state redistribution and the interpretation of the regularised relative entropy of entanglement as an error exponent in hypothesis testing. The distance to the set of separable states is measured by the one-way LOCC norm, an operationally-motivated norm giving the optimal probability of distinguishing two bipartite quantum states, each shared by two parties, using any protocol formed by local quantum operations and one-directional classical communication between the parties. A similar result for the Frobenius or Euclidean norm follows immediately. The result has two applications in complexity theory. The first is a quasipolynomial-time algorithm solving the weak membership problem for the set of separable states in one-way LOCC or Euclidean norm. The second concerns quantum Merlin-Arthur games. Here we show that multiple provers are not more powerful than a single prover when the verifier is restricted to one-way LOCC operations thereby providing a new characterisation of the complexity class QMA.Comment: 24 pages, 1 figure, 1 table. Due to an error in the published version, claims have been weakened from the LOCC norm to the one-way LOCC nor

Estimating operator norms using covering nets

We present several polynomial- and quasipolynomial-time approximation schemes for a large class of generalized operator norms. Special cases include the $2\rightarrow q$ norm of matrices for $q>2$, the support function of the set of separable quantum states, finding the least noisy output of entanglement-breaking quantum channels, and approximating the injective tensor norm for a map between two Banach spaces whose factorization norm through $\ell_1^n$ is bounded. These reproduce and in some cases improve upon the performance of previous algorithms by Brand\~ao-Christandl-Yard and followup work, which were based on the Sum-of-Squares hierarchy and whose analysis used techniques from quantum information such as the monogamy principle of entanglement. Our algorithms, by contrast, are based on brute force enumeration over carefully chosen covering nets. These have the advantage of using less memory, having much simpler proofs and giving new geometric insights into the problem. Net-based algorithms for similar problems were also presented by Shi-Wu and Barak-Kelner-Steurer, but in each case with a run-time that is exponential in the rank of some matrix. We achieve polynomial or quasipolynomial runtimes by using the much smaller nets that exist in $\ell_1$ spaces. This principle has been used in learning theory, where it is known as Maurey's empirical method.Comment: 24 page

The Complexity of the Separable Hamiltonian Problem

In this paper, we study variants of the canonical Local-Hamiltonian problem where, in addition, the witness is promised to be separable. We define two variants of the Local-Hamiltonian problem. The input for the Separable-Local-Hamiltonian problem is the same as the Local-Hamiltonian problem, i.e. a local Hamiltonian and two energies a and b, but the question is somewhat different: the answer is YES if there is a separable quantum state with energy at most a, and the answer is NO if all separable quantum states have energy at least b. The Separable-Sparse-Hamiltonian problem is defined similarly, but the Hamiltonian is not necessarily local, but rather sparse. We show that the Separable-Sparse-Hamiltonian problem is QMA(2)-Complete, while Separable-Local-Hamiltonian is in QMA. This should be compared to the Local-Hamiltonian problem, and the Sparse-Hamiltonian problem which are both QMA-Complete. To the best of our knowledge, Separable-SPARSE-Hamiltonian is the first non-trivial problem shown to be QMA(2)-Complete

Weak multiplicativity for random quantum channels

It is known that random quantum channels exhibit significant violations of multiplicativity of maximum output p-norms for any p>1. In this work, we show that a weaker variant of multiplicativity nevertheless holds for these channels. For any constant p>1, given a random quantum channel N (i.e. a channel whose Stinespring representation corresponds to a random subspace S), we show that with high probability the maximum output p-norm of n copies of N decays exponentially with n. The proof is based on relaxing the maximum output infinity-norm of N to the operator norm of the partial transpose of the projector onto S, then calculating upper bounds on this quantity using ideas from random matrix theory.Comment: 21 pages; v2: corrections and additional remark