## TechTalks from event: FOCS 2011

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## 5B

• The Complexity of Quantum States - a combinatorial approach Authors: Dorit Aharonov, Itai Arad, Zeph Landau, Umesh Vazirani
The classical description of quantum states is in general exponential in the number of qubits. Can we get polynomial descriptions for more restricted sets of states such as ground states of interesting subclasses of local Hamiltonians? This is the basic problem in the study of the complexity of ground states, and requires an understanding of multi-particle entanglement and quantum correlations in such states. We propose a combinatorial approach to this question, based on a reformulation of the detectability lemma introduced by us in the context of quantum gap amplification \cite{ref:Aha09b}. We give an alternative proof of the detectability lemma which is not only simple and intuitive, but also removes a key restriction in the original statement, making it more suitable for this new context. We then provide a one page proof of Hastings' proof that the correlations in the ground states of Gapped Hamiltonians decay exponentially with the distance, demonstrating the simplicity of the combinatorial approach for those problems. As our main application, we provide a combinatorial proof of Hastings' seminal 1D area law \cite{ref:Has07} for the special case of frustration free systems. Area laws provide a fundamental ingredient in the study of the complexity of ground states, since they offer a way to bound in a quantitative way the entanglement in such states. An intricate combinatorial analysis allows us to significantly improve the bounds achieved in Hastings proofs, and derive an exponentially better scaling in terms of the inverse spectral gap and the dimensionality of the particles. This holds out hope that the new approach might be a promising route towards resolving the 2D case and higher dimensions, which is one of the most important open questions in Hamiltonian complexity.
• On the complexity of Commuting Local Hamiltonians, and tight conditions for Topological Order in such systems Authors: Dorit Aharonov and Lior Eldar
The local Hamiltonian problem plays the equivalent role of SAT in quantum complexity theory. Understanding the complexity of the intermediate case in which the constraints are quantum but all local terms in the Hamiltonian commute, is of importance for conceptual, physical and computational complexity reasons. Bravyi and Vyalyi showed in 2003 \cite{BV}, using a clever application of the representation theory of C*-algebras, that if the terms in the Hamiltonian are all two-local, the problem is in NP, and the entanglement in the ground states is local. The general case remained open since then. In this paper we extend this result beyond the two-local case, to the case of three-qubit interactions. We then extend our results even further, and show that NP verification is possible for three-wise interaction between qutrits as well, as long as the interaction graph is planar and also "nearly Euclidean" in some well-defined sense. The proofs imply that in all such systems, the entanglement in the ground states is local. These extensions imply an intriguing sharp transition phenomenon in commuting Hamiltonian systems: the ground spaces of 3-local "physical" systems based on qubits and qutrits are diagonalizable by a basis whose entanglement is highly local, while more involved interactions (the particle dimensionality or the locality of the interaction is larger) can already exhibit topological order; In particular, for those parameters, there exist Hamiltonians all of whose groundstates have entanglement which spreads over scales proportional to the size of the system, such as Kitaev's Toric Code system. This has a direct implication to the developing theory of Topological Order, since it shows that one cannot improve on the parameters to construct topological order systems based on commuting Hamiltonians. This is of particular interest in light of the recent proofs by Bravyi, Hastings and Michalakis
• Quantum query complexity of state conversion Authors: Troy Lee and Rajat Mittal and Ben W. Reichardt and Robert Spalek and Mario Szegedy
State-conversion generalizes query complexity to the problem of converting between two input-dependent quantum states by making queries to the input. We characterize the complexity of this problem by introducing a natural information-theoretic norm that extends the Schur product operator norm. The complexity of converting between two systems of states is given by the distance between them, as measured by this norm. In the special case of function evaluation, the norm is closely related to the general adversary bound, a semi-definite program that lower-bounds the number of input queries needed by a quantum algorithm to evaluate a function. We thus obtain that the general adversary bound characterizes the quantum query complexity of any function whatsoever. This generalizes and simplifies the proof of the same result in the case of boolean input and output. Also in the case of function evaluation, we show that our norm satisfies a remarkable composition property, implying that the quantum query complexity of the composition of two functions is at most the product of the query complexities of the functions, up to a constant. Finally, our result implies that discrete and continuous-time query models are equivalent in the bounded-error setting, even for the general state-conversion problem.
• Optimal bounds for quantum bit commitment Authors: AndrÃ© Chailloux and Iordanis Kerenidis
Bit commitment is a fundamental cryptographic primitive with numerous applications. Quantum information allows for bit commitment schemes in the information theoretic setting where no dishonest party can perfectly cheat. The previously best-known quantum protocol by Ambainis achieved a cheating probability of at most 3/4. On the other hand, Kitaev showed that no quantum protocol can have cheating probability less than 1/sqrt{2}(his lower bound on coin flipping can be easily extended to bit commitment). Closing this gap has since been an important open question. In this paper, we provide the optimal bound for quantum bit commitment. First, we show a lower bound of approximately 0.739, improving Kitaev's lower bound. For this, we present some generic cheating strategies for Alice and Bob and conclude by proving a new relation between the trace distance and fidelity of two quantum states. Second, we present an optimal quantum bit commitment protocol which has cheating probability arbitrarily close to \$0.739\$. More precisely, we show how to use any weak coin flipping protocol with cheating probability 1/2 + eps in order to achieve a quantum bit commitment protocol with cheating probability 0.739 + O(eps). We then use the optimal quantum weak coin flipping protocol described by Mochon. Last, in order to stress the fact that our protocol uses quantum effects beyond the weak coin flip, we show that any classical bit commitment protocol with access to perfect weak (or strong) coin flipping has cheating probability at least 3/4.