Bansal, Nikhil
(Ed.)
QAC0 is the family of constant-depth polynomial-size quantum circuits consisting of arbitrary single qubit unitaries and multi-qubit Toffoli gates. It was introduced by Moore as a quantum counterpart of AC0, along with the conjecture that QAC0 circuits cannot compute PARITY. In this work, we make progress on this long-standing conjecture: we show that any depth-π QAC0 circuit requires π^{1+3^{βπ}} ancillae to compute a function with approximate degree Ξ(π), which includes PARITY, MAJORITY and MOD_π. We further establish superlinear lower bounds on quantum state synthesis and quantum channel synthesis. This is the first lower bound on the super-linear sized QAC0. Regarding PARITY, we show that any further improvement on the size of ancillae to π^{1+exp(βπ(π))} would imply that PARITY β QAC0. These lower bounds are derived by giving low-degree approximations to QAC0 circuits. We show that a depth-π QAC0 circuit with π ancillae, when applied to low-degree operators, has a degree (π + π)^{1β3^{βπ}} polynomial approximation in the spectral norm. This implies that the class QLC0, corresponding to linear size QAC0 circuits, has an approximate degree π(π). This is a quantum generalization of the result that LC0 circuits have an approximate degree π(π) by Bun, Kothari, and Thaler. Our result also implies that QLC0 β NC1.
more »
« less
An official website of the United States government

