Aram Harrow

Abstract Random quantum circuits are commonly viewed as hard to simulate classically. In some regimes this has been formally conjectured, and there had been no evidence against the more general possibility that for circuits with uniformly random gates, approximate simulation of typical instances is almost as hard as exact simulation. We prove that this is not the case by exhibiting a shallow circuit family with uniformly random gates that cannot be efficiently classically simulated near-exactly under standard hardness assumptions, but can be simulated approximately for all but a superpolynomially small fraction of circuit instances in time linear in the number of qubits and gates. We furthermore conjecture that sufficiently shallow random circuits are efficiently simulable more generally. To this end, we propose and analyze two simulation algorithms. Implementing one of our algorithms numerically, we give strong evidence that it is efficient both asymptotically and, in some cases, in practice. To argue analytically for efficiency, we reduce the simulation of 2D shallow random circuits to the simulation of a form of 1D dynamics consisting of alternating rounds of random local unitaries and weak measurements -- a type of process that has generally been observed to undergo a phase transition from an efficient-to-simulate regime to an inefficient-to-simulate regime as measurement strength is varied. Using a mapping from quantum circuits to statistical mechanical models, we give evidence that a similar computational phase transition occurs for our algorithms as parameters of the circuit architecture like the local Hilbert space dimension and circuit depth are varied.

Abstract In this work, we make a connection between two seemingly different problems. The first problem involves characterizing the properties of entanglement in the ground state of gapped local Hamiltonians, which is a central topic in quantum many-body physics. The second problem is on the quantum communication complexity of testing bipartite states with EPR assistance, a well-known question in quantum information theory. We construct a communication protocol for testing (or measuring) the ground state and use its communication complexity to reveal a new structural property for the ground state entanglement. This property, known as the entanglement spread, roughly measures the log of the ratio between the largest and the smallest Schmidt coefficients across a bipartite cut in the ground state. Our main result shows that gapped ground states possess limited entanglement spread across any cut, exhibiting an "area law" behavior. Our result applies to any interaction graph with an improved bound for the special case of lattices. This entanglement spread area law includes interaction graphs constructed in [AHL+14] that violate a generalized area law for the entanglement entropy. Our construction also provides evidence for a conjecture in physics by Li and Haldane on the entanglement spectrum of lattice Hamiltonians [LH08]. On the technical side, we use recent advances in Hamiltonian simulation algorithms along with the quantum phase estimation to give a new construction for an approximate ground space projector (AGSP) over arbitrary interaction graphs, which might be of independent interest.