Jop Briët

In a recent breakthrough in additive combinatorics, Gowers, Green, Manners, and Tao (Annals of Mathematics, 2025) resolved the polynomial Freiman-Ruzsa conjecture. Here, we algorithmize their main result by dequantizing the stabilizer learning algorithm of Chen et al. [QIP'25]

We consider the problem of Clifford testing, which asks whether a black-box $n$-qubit unitary is a Clifford unitary or at least $\varepsilon$-far from every Clifford unitary. We give the first 4-query Clifford tester, which decides this problem with probability~$\mathrm{poly}(\varepsilon)$. This contrasts with the minimum of 6 copies required for the closely-related task of stabilizer testing. We show that our tester is tolerant, by adapting techniques from tolerant stabilizer testing to our setting. In doing so, we settle in the positive a conjecture of Bu, Gu and Jaffe, by proving a polynomial inverse theorem for a non-commutative Gowers 3-uniformity norm. We also consider the restricted setting of single-copy access, where we give an $O(n)$-query Clifford tester that requires no auxiliary memory qubits or adaptivity. We complement this with a lower bound, proving that any such, potentially adaptive, single-copy algorithm needs at least $\Omega(n^{1/4})$ queries. To obtain our results, we leverage the structure of the commutant of the Clifford group, obtaining several technical statements that may be of independent interest.

Mixing (or quasirandom) properties of the natural transition matrix associated to a graph can be quantified by its distance to the complete graph. Different mixing properties correspond to different norms to measure this distance. For dense graphs, two such properties known as spectral expansion and uniformity were shown to be equivalent in seminal 1989 work of Chung, Graham and Wilson. Recently, Conlon and Zhao extended this equivalence to the case of sparse vertex transitive graphs using the famous Grothendieck inequality. Here we generalize these results to the non-commutative, or ‘quantum’, case, where a transition matrix becomes a quantum channel. In particular, we show that for irreducibly covariant quantum channels, expansion is equivalent to a natural analog of uniformity for graphs, generalizing the result of Conlon and Zhao. Moreover, we show that in these results, the non-commutative and commutative (resp.) Grothendieck inequalities yield the best-possible constants.