Optimal spatial searches with long-range tunneling

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates that long-range interactions in quantum walks enable optimal quantum search in lower-dimensional lattices, expanding the potential for efficient quantum algorithms beyond traditional high-dimensional or all-connected systems.

Contribution

It establishes a precise relationship between long-range interaction decay rates and the effective dimension for optimal quantum search, showing how to achieve Grover's scaling in lower dimensions.

Findings

Optimal quantum search is achievable in lower dimensions with long-range interactions.

The dynamics can be mapped to short-range models with effective dimensions.

Long-range interactions enhance quantum search efficiency in practical platforms.

Abstract

A quantum walk on a lattice is a paradigm of a quantum search in a database. The database qubit strings are the lattice sites, qubit rotations are tunneling events, and the target site is tagged by an energy shift. For quantum walks on a continuous time, the walker diffuses across the lattice and the search ends when it localizes at the target site. The search time $T$ can exhibit Grover's optimal scaling with the lattice size $N$, namely, $T\sim \sqrt{N}$, on an all-connected, complete lattice. For finite-range tunneling between sites, instead, Grover's optimal scaling is warranted when the lattice is a hypercube of $d>4$ dimensions. Here, we show that Grover's optimum can be reached in lower dimensions on lattices of long-range interacting particles, when the interaction strength scales algebraically with the distance $r$ as $1/r^{\alpha}$ and $0<\alpha<3d/2$. For $\alpha<d$ the dynamics mimics the one of a globally connected graph. For $d<\alpha<d+2$, the quantum search on the graph can be mapped to a short-range model on a hypercube with spatial dimension $d_s=2d/(\alpha-d)$, indicating that the search is optimal for $d_s>4$. Our work identifies an exact relation between criticality of long-range and short-range systems, it provides a quantitative demonstration of the resources that long-range interactions provide for quantum technologies, and indicates when existing experimental platforms can implement efficient analog quantum search algorithms.