Harumichi Nishimura

In this work, we show that verifying the order of a finite group given as a black-box is in the complexity class QCMA. This solves an open problem asked by Watrous in 2000 in his seminal paper on quantum proofs and directly implies that the Group Non-Membership problem is also in the class QCMA, which further proves a conjecture proposed by Aaronson and Kuperberg in 2006. Our techniques also give improved quantum upper bounds on the complexity of many other group-theoretical problems, such as group isomorphism in black-box groups.

Quantum nondeterministic distributed computing was recently introduced as dQMA (distributed quantum Merlin-Arthur) protocols by Fraigniaud, Le Gall, Nishimura and Paz (ITCS 2021). In dQMA protocols, with the help of quantum proofs and local communication, nodes on a network verify a global property of the network. Fraigniaud et al. showed that, when the network size is small, there exists an exponential separation in proof size between distributed classical and quantum verification protocols, for the equality problem, where the verifiers check if all the data owned by a subset of them are identical. In this paper, we further investigate and characterize the power of the dQMA protocols for various decision problems. First, we give a more efficient dQMA protocol for the equality problem with a simpler analysis. This is done by adding a symmetrization step on each node and exploiting properties of the permutation test, which is a generalization of the SWAP test. We also show a quantum advantage for the equality problem on path networks still persists even when the network size is large, by considering ``relay points'' between extreme nodes. Second, we show that even in a general network, there exist efficient dQMA protocols for the ranking verification problem, the Hamming distance problem, and more problems that derive from efficient quantum one-way communication protocols. Third, in a line network, we construct an efficient dQMA protocol for a problem that has an efficient two-party QMA communication protocol. Finally, we obtain the first lower bounds on the proof and communication cost of dQMA protocols. To prove a lower bound on the equality problem, we show any dQMA protocol with an entangled proof between nodes can be simulated with a dQMA protocol with a separable proof between nodes by using a QMA communication-complete problem introduced by Raz and Shpilka (CCC 2004).

The generation and verification of quantum states are fundamental tasks for quantum information processing that have recently been investigated by Irani, Natarajan, Nirkhe, Rao and Yuen [CCC 2022], Rosenthal and Yuen [ITCS 2022], Metger and Yuen [QIP 2023] under the term emphstate synthesis. This paper studies this concept from the viewpoint of quantum distributed computing, and especially distributed quantum Merlin-Arthur (dQMA) protocols. We first introduce a novel task, on a line, called state generation with distributed inputs (SGDI). In this task, the goal is to generate the quantum state Uketpsi at the rightmost node of the line, where ketpsi is a quantum state given at the leftmost node and U is an unitary matrix whose description is distributed over the nodes of the line. We give a dQMA protocol for SGDI and utilize this protocol to construct a dQMA protocol for the Set Equality problem studied by Naor, Parter and Yogev [SODA 2020], and complement our protocol by showing classical lower bounds for this problem. Our second contribution is a dQMA protocol, based on a recent work by Zhu and Hayashi [Physical Review A, 2019], to create EPR-pairs between adjacent nodes of a network without quantum communication. As an application of this dQMA protocol, we prove a general result showing how to convert any dQMA protocol on an arbitrary network into another dQMA protocol where the verification stage does not require any quantum communication.

Abstract This paper tackles the issue of checking that all copies of a large data set replicated at several nodes of a network are identical. The fact that the replicas may be located at distant nodes prevents the system from verifying their equality locally, i.e., by having each node consult only nodes in its vicinity. On the other hand, it remains possible to assign certificates to the nodes, so that verifying the consistency of the replicas can be achieved locally. However, we show that, as the replicated data is large, classical certification mechanisms, including distributed Merlin-Arthur protocols, cannot guarantee good completeness and soundness simultaneously, unless they use very large certificates. The main result of this paper is a distributed quantum Merlin-Arthur protocol enabling the nodes to collectively check the consistency of the replicas, based on small certificates, and in a single round of message exchange between neighbors, with short messages. In particular, the certificate-size is logarithmic in the size of the data set, which gives an exponential advantage over classical certification mechanisms. We propose yet another usage of a fundamental quantum primitive, called the SWAP test, in order to show our main result.