Heuristic Quantum Advantage with Peaked Circuits

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates a quantum advantage using peaked circuits on a real quantum processor, showing a significant runtime gap compared to classical simulations and proposing applications in quantum-safe encryption.

Contribution

It introduces peaked circuits as a new benchmark for quantum advantage, provides experimental evidence on a quantum processor, and explores their complexity and potential cryptographic applications.

Findings

Quantum circuits with 2000 two-qubit gates can be directly produced in under 2 hours.

Classical simulation of these circuits would take years on exascale supercomputers.

Peaked circuits are proven to be QCMA-complete, indicating their computational hardness.

Abstract

We design and demonstrate heuristic quantum advantage with peaked circuits (HQAP circuits) on Quantinuum's System Model H2 quantum processor. Through extensive experimentation with state-of-the-art classical simulation strategies, we identify a clear gap between classical and quantum runtimes. Our largest instance involves all-to-all connectivity with 2000 two-qubit gates, which H2 can produce the target peaked bitstring directly in under 2 hours. Our extrapolations from leading classical simulation techniques such as tensor networks with belief propagation and Pauli path simulators indicate the same instance would take years on exascale systems (Frontier, Summit), suggesting a potentially exponential separation. This work marks an important milestone toward verifiable quantum advantage, as well as providing a useful benchmarking protocol for current utility-scale quantum hardware. We sketch our protocol for designing these circuits and provide extensive numerical results leading to our extrapolation estimates. Separate from our constructed HQAP circuits, we prove hardness on a decision problem involving generic peaked circuits. When both the input and output bitstrings of a peaked circuit are unknown, determining whether the circuit is peaked constitutes a QCMA-complete problem, meaning the problem remains hard even for a quantum polynomial-time machine under commonly accepted complexity assumptions. Inspired by this observation, we propose an application of the peaked circuits as a potentially quantum-safe encryption scheme~\cite{chen2016report,kumar2020post,joseph2022transitioning,dam2023survey}. We make our peaked circuits publicly available and invite the community to try additional methods to solve these circuits to see if this gap persists even with novel classical techniques.