A central problem in quantum computation is to understand which quantum
circuits are useful for exponential speed-ups over classical computation. We
address this question in the setting of query complexity and show that for
almost any sufficiently long quantum circuit one can construct a black-box
problem which is solved by the circuit with a constant number of quantum
queries, but which requires exponentially many classical queries, even if the
classical machine has the ability to postselect.
We prove the result in two steps. In the first, we show that almost any
element of an approximate unitary 3-design is useful to solve a certain
black-box problem efficiently. The problem is based on a recent oracle
construction of Aaronson and gives an exponential separation between quantum
and classical bounded-error with postselection query complexities.
In the second step, which may be of independent interest, we prove that
linear-sized random quantum circuits give an approximate unitary 3-design. The
key ingredient in the proof is a technique from quantum many-body theory to
lower bound the spectral gap of local quantum Hamiltonians.Comment: 24 pages. v2 minor correction