The main observation of this work is that Haar randomness can be replaced by random permutations without changing the limiting geometry responsible for nonadditivity, and this replacement turns a continuous problem over unitary matrices into a discrete combinatorial problem over zero--one permutation matrices, and thereby opens a path toward derandomization.
Abstract
Since Hastings'proof of superadditivity of classical communication over quantum channels, considerable effort has been devoted to finding a structural explanation of this phenomenon that was originally established by concentration of measure for Haar random unitaries. The main observation of this work is that Haar randomness can be replaced by random permutations without changing the limiting geometry responsible for nonadditivity. This replacement turns a continuous problem over unitary matrices into a discrete combinatorial problem over zero--one permutation matrices, and thereby opens a path toward derandomization. The theorem of Bordenave and Collins shows that random permutations have the required limiting behavior and the algorithm of O'Donnell and Wu then provides a deterministic asymptotic construction, running in polynomial time in the size when the channel parameters and accuracy are fixed. Thus the random construction can be derandomized in an asymptotic algorithmic sense, although finding a simple closed-form or practically computable counterexample remains open. Finally, a quantitative random permutation estimate by Chen, Garza-Vargas, Tropp and van Handel gives a fully numerical estimate: there exists a tuple of 57,836,025 permutations acting on a set of size \[ N \le 5.422\times 10^{116216}\] such that the associated finite dimensional channel exhibits nonadditivity. This enormous value remains an obstacle to a practical construction.
A weak anti-concentration bound is established by upper-bounding the probability that a random Gaussian permanent is superexponentially smaller than its standard deviation, which implies that classically simulating boson sampling to within a superexponentially small total variation distance would collapse the polynomial hierarchy.
Fei Meng, Bin Cheng, Jianan Li et al.· 0 citations
Aaronson and Ambainis (Theory of Computing, 2014) conjectured that quantum query algorithms admit efficient almost-everywhere classical simulation: for any $T$-query quantum algorithm, its acceptance probability can be approximated on a $(1-\delta)$ fraction of inputs, up to $\epsilon$ additive error, using $\mathrm{poly}(T, 1/\epsilon, 1/\delta)$ classical queries. At a high level, the conjecture suggests that exponential quantum speedups are possible only on sufficiently structured inputs. In this work, we make progress on this conjecture by proving it for quantum algorithms that make massively parallel quantum queries. In contrast, Yamakawa and Zhandry (Journal of the ACM, 2024) showed that quantum algorithms restricted to parallel queries can still achieve exponential speedups over classical algorithms for sampling problems. We establish our simulation theorem by proving the stronger statement that parallel-query quantum algorithms cannot distinguish the uniform distribution over oracles from oracles drawn from so-called"dense distributions". Our main technical contribution is a coupling theorem that relates the uniform distribution over oracles to oracles drawn from dense distributions. We further extend this approach beyond the purely parallel setting, obtaining simulation theorems both for algorithms with a bounded quantum-query prefix followed by a massively parallel quantum-query stage, and for hybrid algorithms that make an arbitrary polynomial number of adaptive classical queries before the massively parallel quantum-query stage. Finally, using the parallel-query simulation theorem as a base case, we obtain simulation theorems for quantum algorithms with constant rounds of adaptivity.
Unitary designs provide finite-moment approximations to Haar-random unitaries, with wide-ranging applications across physics and quantum information, from scrambling and black-hole dynamics to foundational primitives in quantum algorithms. Strong unitary designs capture a more demanding operational notion of approximation, requiring indistinguishability from Haar randomness even for quantum algorithms that may access a unitary not only in the forward direction, but also through its inverse, transpose, and complex conjugate. Motivated by the physical requirement that scrambling arise within the system itself, Schuster, Ma, Lombardi, Brand\~ao, and Huang (arXiv:2509.26310) left open whether strong unitary designs can be generated in logarithmic depth using only the system qubits. For every fixed design order $k$ and measurable-error tolerance, we construct strong approximate unitary $k$-designs in optimal $\Theta(\log n)$ all-to-all circuit depth using only the $n$ original system qubits. Our new ingredient is a logarithmic-depth Pauli-mixing bound for the perfect-matching ensemble, whose layers pair the qubits uniformly at random and apply independent random two-qubit gates. This bound controls the mixed forward-reverse two-query case, which we combine with existing design and gluing results to obtain strong unitary designs of arbitrary fixed order.
Teodor Parella-Dilmé, Júlia Barberà-Rodríguez, Salvatore F. E. Oliviero et al.· 1 citation
Several open problems in quantum information theory can be formulated as equipartition problems for positive operators, asking for a decomposition into bounded-rank positive parts under uniform constraints. The existence problems for SIC-POVMs and MUBs are of this type, as is the Ruskai-Audenaert conjecture. We first show that certain problems of this form can be attacked using equivariant cohomology, and then present new results on the Ruskai-Audenaert conjecture. In its weak form, this conjecture asserts that every quantum channel admits a convex decomposition into a minimal number of generalized extreme points; in its strong form, one with equal weights. We prove the strong conjecture in all dimensions for a set of channels of nonzero measure, including all cq- and qc-channels, as well as for all channels with qubit inputs. We also prove the weak conjecture for all qutrit channels, along with further results on convex decompositions of quantum channels.
It is well established that quantum strategies outperform classical ones in several communication tasks. We study the quantum communication complexity of correlations arising from joint measurements on quantum systems distributed across a star network, where several parties each send a quantum system to a central node. We introduce an exclusion task that can be solved perfectly when each party sends a quantum $d$-level system, but would require a large classical message otherwise. In fact, the task cannot be solved with certainty if each of the $n$ parties sends a classical message with less than $n^{(d-1)}$ symbols. This implies an advantage of using quantum over classical messages in that scenario that scales with both, the dimension of the quantum system and the number of systems measured simultaneously. As an application, this shows that no finite-size classical description of a qubit suffices to reproduce the statistics of a joint measurement on sufficiently many qubits.
Access to the complex conjugate of an unknown quantum channel is a useful resource in quantum oracle problems, motivating the question of how such access can be simulated using only a limited number of calls to the original channel. We determine the optimal deterministic protocol for approximately implementing the complex conjugate isometry $\overline{V}$ from $n$ uses of an unknown isometry channel $V: \mathbb{C}^d\to\mathbb{C}^D$. We derive a closed-form expression for the optimal fidelity and prove that a parallel protocol is optimal even among general quantum superchannels, including adaptive and indefinite-causal-order strategies. The formula implies a query complexity $n=\Theta(d[(D-d)/\epsilon+1])$ for achieving infidelity $\epsilon$. We also present a circuit construction based on the quantum Schur transform and the dual Clebsch--Gordan transform, with circuit complexity $O(\mathrm{poly}(D,1/\epsilon))$. This task is extended to the multi-copy case $V^{\otimes n}\mapsto \overline{V}^{\otimes k}$. For fixed $d<D$ and $k$, we show that the optimal fidelity for the multi-copy case is $1-kd(D-d)/n+o(n^{-1})$, and that this value is asymptotically attained by a parallel estimation-based protocol. Finally, combining the isometry protocol with random Stinespring dilations yields a protocol for complex conjugation of unknown rank-$r$ quantum channels whose query complexity is optimal up to a constant factor if the Kraus rank $r$ is constant.
Satoshi Yoshida, M. Murao· 1 citation
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