On Polynomially Many Queries to NP or QMA Oracles

We study the complexity of problems solvable in deterministic polynomial time with access to an NP or Quantum Merlin-Arthur (QMA)-oracle, such as $P^{NP}$ and $P^{QMA}$, respectively. The former allows one to classify problems more finely than the Polynomial-Time Hierarchy (PH), whereas the latter characterizes physically motivated problems such as Approximate Simulation (APX-SIM) [Ambainis, CCC 2014]. In this area, a central role has been played by the classes $P^{NP[\log]}$ and $P^{QMA[\log]}$, defined identically to $P^{NP}$ and $P^{QMA}$, except that only logarithmically many oracle queries are allowed. Here, [Gottlob, FOCS 1993] showed that if the adaptive queries made by a $P^{NP}$ machine have a "query graph" which is a tree, then this computation can be simulated in $P^{NP[\log]}$. In this work, we first show that for any verification class $C\in\{NP,MA,QCMA,QMA,QMA(2),NEXP,QMA_{\exp}\}$, any $P^C$ machine with a query graph of "separator number" $s$ can be simulated using deterministic time $\exp(s\log n)$ and $s\log n$ queries to a $C$-oracle. When $s\in O(1)$ (which includes the case of $O(1)$-treewidth, and thus also of trees), this gives an upper bound of $P^{C[\log]}$, and when $s\in O(\log^k(n))$, this yields bound $QP^{C[\log^{k+1}]}$ (QP meaning quasi-polynomial time). We next show how to combine Gottlob's "admissible-weighting function" framework with the "flag-qubit" framework of [Watson, Bausch, Gharibian, 2020], obtaining a unified approach for embedding $P^C$ computations directly into APX-SIM instances in a black-box fashion. Finally, we formalize a simple no-go statement about polynomials (c.f. [Krentel, STOC 1986]): Given a multi-linear polynomial $p$ specified via an arithmetic circuit, if one can "weakly compress" $p$ so that its optimal value requires $m$ bits to represent, then $P^{NP}$ can be decided with only $m$ queries to an NP-oracle.Comment: 46 pages pages, 5 figures, to appear in ITCS 202

Perturbation Gadgets: Arbitrary Energy Scales from a Single Strong Interaction

In this work we propose a many-body Hamiltonian construction which introduces only a single separate energy scale of order $\Theta(1/N^{2+\delta})$, for a small parameter $\delta>0$, and for $N$ terms in the target Hamiltonian. In its low-energy subspace, the construction can approximate any normalized target Hamiltonian $H_\mathrm{t}=\sum_{i=1}^N h_i$ with norm ratios $r=\max_{i,j\in\{1,\ldots,N\}}\|h_i\| / \| h_j \|=O(\exp(\exp(\mathrm{poly} n)))$ to within relative precision $O(N^{-\delta})$. This comes at the expense of increasing the locality by at most one, and adding an at most poly-sized ancilliary system for each coupling; interactions on the ancilliary system are geometrically local, and can be translationally-invariant. As an application, we discuss implications for QMA-hardness of the local Hamiltonian problem, and argue that "almost" translational invariance-defined as arbitrarily small relative variations of the strength of the local terms-is as good as non-translational-invariance in many of the constructions used throughout Hamiltonian complexity theory. We furthermore show that the choice of geared limit of many-body systems, where e.g. width and height of a lattice are taken to infinity in a specific relation, can have different complexity-theoretic implications: even for translationally-invariant models, changing the geared limit can vary the hardness of finding the ground state energy with respect to a given promise gap from computationally trivial, to QMAEXP-, or even BQEXPSPACE-complete

stateQIP = statePSPACE

Complexity theory traditionally studies the hardness of solving classical computational problems. In the quantum setting, it is also natural to consider a different notion of complexity, namely the complexity of physically preparing a certain quantum state. We study the relation between two such state complexity classes: statePSPACE, which contains states that can be generated by space-uniform polynomial-space quantum circuits, and stateQIP, which contains states that a polynomial-time quantum verifier can generate by interacting with an all-powerful untrusted quantum prover. The latter class was recently introduced by Rosenthal and Yuen (ITCS 2022), who proved that statePSPACE $\subseteq$ stateQIP. Our main result is the reverse inclusion, stateQIP $\subseteq$ statePSPACE, thereby establishing equality of the two classes and providing a natural state-complexity analogue to the celebrated QIP = PSPACE theorem of Jain, et al. (J. ACM 2011). To prove this, we develop a polynomial-space quantum algorithm for solving a large class of exponentially large "PSPACE-computable" semidefinite programs (SDPs), which also prepares an optimiser encoded in a quantum state. Our SDP solver relies on recent block-encoding techniques from quantum algorithms, demonstrating that these techniques are also useful for complexity theory. Using similar techniques, we also show that optimal prover strategies for general quantum interactive protocols can be implemented in quantum polynomial space. We prove this by studying an algorithmic version of Uhlmann's theorem and establishing an upper bound on the complexity of implementing Uhlmann transformations.Comment: 61 page