Perimeter Institute Quantum Discussions

Many quantum information protocols require the implementation of random unitaries. Because it takes exponential resources to produce Haar-random unitaries drawn from the full n-qubit group, one often resorts to t-designs. Unitary t-designs mimic the Haar-measure up to t-th moments. It is known that Clifford operations can implement at most 3-designs. In this work, we quantify the non-Clifford resources required to break this barrier.

Basic statistical properties of quantum many-body systems in thermal equilibrium can be obtained from their partition function. In this talk, I will present a quasi-polynomial time classical algorithm that estimates the partition function of quantum many-body systems at temperatures above the thermal phase transition point. It is known that in the worst case, the same problem is NP-hard below this temperature. This shows that the transition in the phase of a quantum system is also accompanied by a transition in the computational hardness of estimating its statistical properties.

It is believed that active quantum error correction will be an essential ingredient to build a scalable quantum computer. The currently favored scheme is the surface code due to its high decoding threshold and efficient decoding algorithm. However, it suffers from large overheads which are even more severe when parity check measurements are subject to errors and have to be repeated. Furthermore, the number of encoded qubits in the surface code does not grow with system size, leading to a sub-optimal use of the physical qubits.

We investigate weak coin flipping, a fundamental cryptographic primitive where two distrustful parties need to remotely establish a shared random bit. A cheating player can try to bias the output bit towards a preferred value. A weak coin-flipping protocol has a bias ϵ if neither player can force the outcome towards their preferred value with probability more than 1/2+ϵ. While it is known that classically ϵ=1/2, Mochon showed in 2007 [arXiv:0711.4114] that quantumly weak coin flipping can be achieved with arbitrarily small bias, i.e.