The power of fixing a few qubits in proofs

What could happen if we pinned a single qubit of a system and fixed it in a particular state? First, we show that this leads to difficult static questions about the ground-state properties of local Hamiltonian problems with restricted types of terms. In particular, we show that the pinned commuting and pinned stoquastic Local Hamiltonian problems are quantum-Merlin-Arthur–complete. Second, we investigate pinned dynamics and demonstrate that fixing a single qubit via often repeated measurements results in universal quantum computation with commuting Hamiltonians. Finally, we discuss variants of the ground-state connectivity (GSCON) problem in light of pinning, and show that stoquastic GSCON is quantum-classical Merlin-Arthur–complete

Verification of Many-Qubit States

Verification is a task to check whether a given quantum state is close to an ideal state or not. In this paper, we show that a variety of many-qubit quantum states can be verified with only sequential single-qubit measurements of Pauli operators. First, we introduce a protocol for verifying ground states of Hamiltonians. We next explain how to verify quantum states generated by a certain class of quantum circuits. We finally propose an adaptive test of stabilizers that enables the verification of all polynomial-time-generated hypergraph states, which include output states of the Bremner-Montanaro-Shepherd-type instantaneous quantum polynomial time (IQP) circuits. Importantly, we do not make any assumption that the identically and independently distributed copies of the same states are given: Our protocols work even if some highly complicated entanglement is created among copies in any artificial way. As applications, we consider the verification of the quantum computational supremacy demonstration with IQP models, and verifiable blind quantum computing.Comment: 15 pages, 3 figures, published versio