52 research outputs found
Uniform Diagonalization Theorem for Complexity Classes of Promise Problems including Randomized and Quantum Classes
Diagonalization in the spirit of Cantor's diagonal arguments is a widely used
tool in theoretical computer sciences to obtain structural results about
computational problems and complexity classes by indirect proofs. The Uniform
Diagonalization Theorem allows the construction of problems outside complexity
classes while still being reducible to a specific decision problem. This paper
provides a generalization of the Uniform Diagonalization Theorem by extending
it to promise problems and the complexity classes they form, e.g. randomized
and quantum complexity classes. The theorem requires from the underlying
computing model not only the decidability of its acceptance and rejection
behaviour but also of its promise-contradicting indifferent behaviour - a
property that we will introduce as "total decidability" of promise problems.
Implications of the Uniform Diagonalization Theorem are mainly of two kinds:
1. Existence of intermediate problems (e.g. between BQP and QMA) - also known
as Ladner's Theorem - and 2. Undecidability if a problem of a complexity class
is contained in a subclass (e.g. membership of a QMA-problem in BQP). Like the
original Uniform Diagonalization Theorem the extension applies besides BQP and
QMA to a large variety of complexity class pairs, including combinations from
deterministic, randomized and quantum classes.Comment: 15 page
Oracle Complexity Classes and Local Measurements on Physical Hamiltonians
The canonical problem for the class Quantum Merlin-Arthur (QMA) is that of
estimating ground state energies of local Hamiltonians. Perhaps surprisingly,
[Ambainis, CCC 2014] showed that the related, but arguably more natural,
problem of simulating local measurements on ground states of local Hamiltonians
(APX-SIM) is likely harder than QMA. Indeed, [Ambainis, CCC 2014] showed that
APX-SIM is P^QMA[log]-complete, for P^QMA[log] the class of languages decidable
by a P machine making a logarithmic number of adaptive queries to a QMA oracle.
In this work, we show that APX-SIM is P^QMA[log]-complete even when restricted
to more physical Hamiltonians, obtaining as intermediate steps a variety of
related complexity-theoretic results.
We first give a sequence of results which together yield P^QMA[log]-hardness
for APX-SIM on well-motivated Hamiltonians: (1) We show that for NP, StoqMA,
and QMA oracles, a logarithmic number of adaptive queries is equivalent to
polynomially many parallel queries. These equalities simplify the proofs of our
subsequent results. (2) Next, we show that the hardness of APX-SIM is preserved
under Hamiltonian simulations (a la [Cubitt, Montanaro, Piddock, 2017]). As a
byproduct, we obtain a full complexity classification of APX-SIM, showing it is
complete for P, P^||NP, P^||StoqMA, or P^||QMA depending on the Hamiltonians
employed. (3) Leveraging the above, we show that APX-SIM is P^QMA[log]-complete
for any family of Hamiltonians which can efficiently simulate spatially sparse
Hamiltonians, including physically motivated models such as the 2D Heisenberg
model.
Our second focus considers 1D systems: We show that APX-SIM remains
P^QMA[log]-complete even for local Hamiltonians on a 1D line of 8-dimensional
qudits. This uses a number of ideas from above, along with replacing the "query
Hamiltonian" of [Ambainis, CCC 2014] with a new "sifter" construction.Comment: 38 pages, 3 figure
Beating Random Assignment for Approximating Quantum 2-Local Hamiltonian Problems
The quantum k-Local Hamiltonian problem is a natural generalization of classical constraint satisfaction problems (k-CSP) and is complete for QMA, a quantum analog of NP. Although the complexity of k-Local Hamiltonian problems has been well studied, only a handful of approximation results are known. For Max 2-Local Hamiltonian where each term is a rank 3 projector, a natural quantum generalization of classical Max 2-SAT, the best known approximation algorithm was the trivial random assignment, yielding a 0.75-approximation. We present the first approximation algorithm beating this bound, a classical polynomial-time 0.764-approximation. For strictly quadratic instances, which are maximally entangled instances, we provide a 0.801 approximation algorithm, and numerically demonstrate that our algorithm is likely a 0.821-approximation. We conjecture these are the hardest instances to approximate. We also give improved approximations for quantum generalizations of other related classical 2-CSPs. Finally, we exploit quantum connections to a generalization of the Grothendieck problem to obtain a classical constant-factor approximation for the physically relevant special case of strictly quadratic traceless 2-Local Hamiltonians on bipartite interaction graphs, where a inverse logarithmic approximation was the best previously known (for general interaction graphs). Our work employs recently developed techniques for analyzing classical approximations of CSPs and is intended to be accessible to both quantum information scientists and classical computer scientists
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