Quantum speedup in stoquastic adiabatic quantum computation

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates that stoquastic adiabatic quantum computation (stoqAQC) can achieve universal quantum computation and solve problems like factoring in polynomial time, challenging the notion that it is less powerful than universal quantum computers.

Contribution

The authors construct a concrete stoqAQC model capable of universal quantum computation and polynomial-time factoring, showing quantum advantage with restricted Hamiltonians.

Findings

StoqAQC can simulate universal quantum computation.

StoqAQC can solve factoring in polynomial time.

Classical simulation of stoqAQC is computationally hard.

Abstract

Quantum computation provides exponential speedup for solving certain mathematical problems against classical computers. Motivated by current rapid experimental progress on quantum computing devices, various models of quantum computation have been investigated to show quantum computational supremacy. At a commercial side, quantum annealing machine realizes the quantum Ising model with a transverse field and heuristically solves combinatorial optimization problems. The computational power of this machine is closely related to adiabatic quantum computation (AQC) with a restricted type of Hamiltonians, namely stoquastic Hamiltonians, and has been thought to be relatively less powerful compared to universal quantum computers. Little is known about computational quantum speedup nor advantage in AQC with stoquastic Hamiltonians. Here we characterize computational capability of AQC with stoquastic Hamiltonians, which we call stoqAQC. We construct a concrete stoqAQC model, whose lowest energy gap is lower bounded polynomially, and hence the final state can be obtained in polynomial time. Then we show that it can simulate universal quantum computation if adaptive single-qubit measurements in non-standard bases are allowed on the final state. Even if the measurements are restricted to non-adaptive measurements to respect the robustness of AQC, the proposed model exhibits quantum computational supremacy; classical simulation is impossible under complexity theoretical conjectures. Moreover, it is found that such a stoqAQC model can simulate Shor's algorithm and solve the factoring problem in polynomial time. We also propose how to overcome the measurement imperfections via quantum error correction within the stoqAQC model and also an experimentally feasible verification scheme to test whether or not stoqAQC is done faithfully.