Clifford Gates in the Holant Framework

We show that the Clifford gates and stabilizer circuits in the quantum computing literature, which admit efficient classical simulation, are equivalent to affine signatures under a unitary condition. The latter is a known class of tractable functions under the Holant framework.Comment: 14 page

On the Complexity of #CSP^d

Counting CSP^d is the counting constraint satisfaction problem (#CSP in short) restricted to the instances where every variable occurs a multiple of d times. This paper revisits tractable structures in #CSP and gives a complexity classification theorem for #CSP^d with algebraic complex weights. The result unifies affine functions (stabilizer states in quantum information theory) and related variants such as the local affine functions, the discovery of which leads to all the recent progress on the complexity of Holant problems. The Holant is a framework that generalizes counting CSP. In the literature on Holant problems, weighted constraints are often expressed as tensors (vectors) such that projections and linear transformations help analyze the structure. This paper gives an example showing that different classes of tensors distinguished by these algebraic operations may share the same closure property under tensor product and contraction

From Holant to Quantum Entanglement and Back

Holant problems are intimately connected with quantum theory as tensor networks. We first use techniques from Holant theory to derive new and improved results for quantum entanglement theory. We discover two particular entangled states |??? of 6 qubits and |??? of 8 qubits respectively, that have extraordinary closure properties in terms of the Bell property. Then we use entanglement properties of constraint functions to derive a new complexity dichotomy for all real-valued Holant problems containing a signature of odd arity. The signatures need not be symmetric, and no auxiliary signatures are assumed