Harold Ollivier

Quantum state purification is the functionality that, given multiple copies of an unknown state, outputs a state with increased purity. This is an essential building block for the near- and middle-term quantum ecosystems before the availability of full fault tolerance, where one may want to obtain purified quantum states instead of expectation values. We propose an effective state purification gadget with a moderate quantum overhead by projecting multiple noisy quantum inputs to their symmetry subspace defined by a set of projectors forming a subgroup of the symmetry group. This provides a state purification performance scaling inverse-linearly to the number of state copies given a fixed stochastic error rate, which drastically improves the implementation overhead in previous works. Our method may find its application in designing robust verification protocols for quantum outputs before the availability of fully fault-tolerant computing.

Secure Delegated Quantum Computation (SDQC) protocols allow a client to delegate a quantum computation to a powerful remote server while ensuring the privacy and the integrity of its computation. Recent resource-efficient and noise- robust protocols led to experimental proofs of concept. Yet, their physical re- quirements are still too stringent to be added directly to the roadmap of quantum hardware vendors. To address part of this issue, this paper shows how to alleviate the necessity for the client to have a single-photon source. It proposes a protocol that ensures that, among a sufficiently large block of transmitted weak coherent pulses, at least one of them was emitted as a single photon. This can then be used through quantum privacy amplification techniques to prepare a single secure qubit to be used in an SDQC protocol. As such, the obtained guarantee can also be used for Quantum Key Distribution (QKD) where the privacy amplification step is classical. In doing so, it proposes a workaround for a weakness in the security proof of the decoy state method. The simplest instantiation of the protocol with only 2 intensities already shows improved scaling at low transmittance and adds verifiability to previous SDQC proposals.

With the advent of delegated quantum computing as a service, verifying quantum computations is becoming a question of great importance. Existing information theoretically Secure Delegated Quantum Computing (SDQC) protocols require the client to possess the ability to perform either trusted state preparations or measurements. Whether it is possible to verify universal quantum computations with information-theoretic security without trusted preparations or measurements was an open question so far. In this paper, we settle this question in the affirmative by presenting a modular, composable, and efficient way to turn known verification schemes into protocols that rely only on trusted gates.

With the recent availability of cloud quantum computing services, the question of verifying quantum computations delegated by a client to a quantum server is becoming of practical interest. While Verifiable Blind Quantum Computing (VBQC) has emerged as one of the key approaches to address this challenge, current protocols still need to be optimised before they are truly practical. To this end, we establish a fundamental correspondence between error-detection and verification and provide sufficient conditions to both achieve security in the Abstract Cryptography framework and optimise resource overheads of all known VBQC-based protocols. As a direct application, we demonstrate how to systematise the search for new efficient and robust verification protocols for BQP computations. While we have chosen Measurement-Based Quantum Computing (MBQC) as the working model for the presentation of our results, one could expand the domain of applicability of our framework via direct known translation between the circuit model and MBQC.

Secure multi-party computation (SMPC) protocols allow several parties that distrust each other to collectively compute a function on their inputs. In this paper, we introduce a protocol that lifts classical SMPC to quantum SMPC in a composably and statistically secure way, even for a single honest party. Unlike previous quantum SMPC protocols, our proposal only requires very limited quantum resources from all but one party; it suffices that the weak parties, i.e. the clients, are able to prepare single-qubit states in the X-Y plane. The novel quantum SMPC protocol is constructed in a naturally modular way, and relies on a new technique for quantum verification that is of independent interest. This verification technique requires the remote preparation of states only in a single plane of the Bloch sphere. In the course of proving the security of the new verification protocol, we also uncover a fundamental invariance that is inherent to measurement-based quantum computing.