Symmetric quantum computation

TL;DR

This paper introduces symmetric quantum circuits, a new model that preserves problem symmetries, demonstrating their superior power over classical circuits and providing efficient algorithms for key quantum tasks.

Contribution

The paper systematically studies symmetric quantum circuits, establishing their enhanced computational power and providing efficient implementations for important quantum algorithms.

Findings

Symmetric quantum circuits outperform classical counterparts in key tasks.

Efficient symmetric circuits for amplitude amplification, phase estimation, and linear combination of unitaries.

Exponential separation for XOR-SAT problem in the symmetric setting.

Abstract

We introduce a systematic study of "symmetric quantum circuits", a new restricted model of quantum computation that preserves the symmetries of the problems it solves. This model is well-adapted for studying the role of symmetry in quantum speedups, extending a central notion of symmetric computation studied in the classical setting. Our results establish that symmetric quantum circuits are fundamentally more powerful than their classical counterparts. First, we give efficient symmetric circuits for key quantum techniques such as amplitude amplification, phase estimation and linear combination of unitaries. In addition, we show how the task of symmetric state preparation can be performed efficiently in several natural cases. Finally, we demonstrate an exponential separation in the symmetric setting for the problem XOR-SAT, which requires exponential-size symmetric classical circuits but can be solved by polynomial-size symmetric quantum circuits.