Dorian Rudolph

We investigate the role of energy, i.e. average photon number, in the computational complexity of bosonic systems. We show three sets of results: (1. Energy growth rates) There exist bosonic gate sets which increase energy incredibly rapidly, obtaining e.g. infinite energy in finite/constant time. We prove these high energies can make computing properties of bosonic computations, such as deciding whether a given computation will attain infinite energy, extremely difficult, formally undecidable. (2. Lower bounds on computational power) More energy "=" more computational power. For example, certain gate sets allow poly-time bosonic computations to simulate PTOWER, the set of deterministic computations whose runtime scales as a tower of exponentials with polynomial height. Even just exponential energy and O(1) modes suffice to simulate NP, which, importantly, is a setup similar to that of the recent bosonic factoring algorithm of [Brenner, Caha, Coiteux-Roy and Koenig (2024)]. For simpler gate sets, we show an energy hierarchy theorem. (3. Upper bounds on computational power) Bosonic computations with polynomial energy can be simulated in BQP, "physical" bosonic computations with arbitrary finite energy are decidable, and the gate set consisting of Gaussian gates and the cubic phase gate can be simulated in PP, with exponential bound on energy, improving upon the previous PSPACE upper bound. Finally, combining upper and lower bounds yields no-go theorems for a continuous-variable Solovay-Kitaev theorem for gate sets such as the Gaussian and cubic phase gates. Our results imply that, just like time and space, energy is a computational resource, and that theoretical models taking energy into account are needed for bosonic quantum computations.

We prove several new results concerning the pure quantum polynomial hierarchy pureQPH. First, we show that QMA(2) ⊆ pureQΣ_2, i.e., two unentangled existential provers can be simulated by competing existential and universal provers. We further prove that pureQΣ_2 ⊆ QΣ_3 ⊆ NEXP. Second, we give an error reduction result for pureQPH, and, as a consequence, prove that pureQPH = QPH. A key ingredient in this result is an improved dimension-independent disentangler. Finally, we initiate the study of quantified Hamiltonian complexity, the quantum analogue of quantified Boolean formulae. We prove that the quantified pure sparse Hamiltonian problem is pureQΣ_i-complete. By contrast, other natural variants (pure/local, mixed/local, and mixed/sparse) admit nontrivial containments but fail to be complete under known techniques. For example, we show that the ∃∀-mixed local Hamiltonian problem lies in NP^QMA ∩ coNP^QMA.

The theory of Total Function NP (TFNP) and its subclasses says that, even if one is promised an efficiently verifiable proof exists for a problem, finding this proof can be intractable. Despite being a classical complexity class, however, TFNP has made a surprise appearance in the study of Quantum Satisfiability (QSAT): If a QSAT instance has a System of Distinct Representatives (SDR), then it has a product-state solution [Laumann, Läuchli, Moessner, Scardicchio, and Sondhi 2010]. Efficiently finding this product-state solution, however, has remained elusive. In this work, we introduce a new framework based on Weighted SDRs (WSDR), which among other results, allows us to: (1) significantly simplify and extend the results of [LLMSS 2010] to qudit systems, (2) establish a connection to the Bézout number for multihomogeneous polynomial systems, and (3) apply the parameterized algorithm of [Aldi, de Beaudrap, Gharibian, Saeedi 2021] to solve new instances of QSAT efficiently on qudits. The second of these, in particular, allows us to define the first ""quantum-inspired"" subclass of TFNP, for which we show QSAT with SDR is complete. Thus, we obtain the first evidence that QSAT with SDR is, in fact, intractable.

Despite the fundamental role the Quantum Satisfiability (QSAT) problem has played in quantum complexity theory, a central question remains open: At which local dimension does the complexity of QSAT transition from ""easy"" to ""hard""? Here, we study QSAT with each constraint acting on a k-dimensional and l-dimensional qudit pair, denoted (k,l)-QSAT. Our first main result shows that, surprisingly, QSAT on qubits can remain QMA_1-hard, in that (2,5)-QSAT is QMA_1-complete. (QMA_1 is a quantum analogue of MA with perfect completeness.) In contrast, (2,2)-QSAT (i.e. Quantum 2-SAT on qubits) is well-known to be poly-time solvable [Bravyi, 2006]. Our second main result proves that (3,d)-QSAT on the 1D line with d = O(1) is also QMA_1-hard. Finally, we initiate the study of (2,d)-QSAT on the 1D line by giving a frustration-free 1D Hamiltonian with a unique, entangled ground state. As implied by our title, our first result uses a direct embedding: We combine a novel clock construction with the 2D circuit-to-Hamiltonian construction of [Gosset and Nagaj, 2013]. Of note is a new simplified and analytic proof for the latter (as opposed to a partially numeric proof in [GN13]). This exploits Unitary Labelled Graphs [Bausch, Cubitt, Ozols, 2017] together with a new ""Nullspace Connection Lemma"", allowing us to break low energy analyses into small patches of projectors, and to improve the soundness analysis of [GN13] from Omega(1/T^6) to Omega(1/T^2), for T the number of gates. Our second result goes via black-box reduction: Given an arbitrary 1D Hamiltonian H on d'-dimensional qudits, we show how to embed it into an effective 1D (3,d)-QSAT instance, for d = O(1). Our approach may be viewed as a weaker notion of ""simulation"" (à la [Bravyi, Hastings 2017], [Cubitt, Montanaro, Piddock 2018]). As far as we are aware, this gives the first ""black-box simulation""-based QMA_1-hardness result.

Classical shadows are succinct classical representations of quantum states which allow one to encode a set of properties P of a quantum state rho, while only requiring measurements on logarithmically many copies of rho in the size of P. In this work, we initiate the study of verification of classical shadows, denoted classical shadow validity (CSV), from the perspective of computational complexity, which asks: Given a classical shadow S, how hard is it to verify that S predicts the measurement statistics of a quantum state? We first show that even for the elegantly simple classical shadow protocol of [Huang, Kueng, Preskill, Nature Physics 2020] utilizing local Clifford measurements, CSV is QMA-complete. This hardness continues to hold for the high-dimensional extension of said protocol due to [Mao, Yi, and Zhu, PRL 2025]. In contrast, we show that for the HKP and MYZ protocols utilizing global Clifford measurements, CSV can be "dequantized'' for low-rank observables, i.e., solved in randomized poly-time with standard sampling assumptions. Finally, we show that CSV for exponentially many observables is complete for a quantum generalization of the second level of the polynomial hierarchy, yielding the first natural complete problem for such a class.