Collective cost of tensor-power state preparation
- Field
- Topics
Problem
Determine the asymptotic weighted circuit cost of preparing tensor powers of a known pure state, and characterize when collective preparation is cheaper per copy than independent preparation. On an arbitrary qubit register, allow Pauli-product rotations \(e^{i\phi P}\) with \(\phi\in\mathbb{R}\) and \(P\in\{I,X,Y,Z\}^{\otimes q}\), assigning each such gate the cost \(|\phi|\). For a known \(m\)-qubit state \(\lvert\psi\rangle\), let \(U(\boldsymbol\phi,\boldsymbol P):=\prod_{j=1}^r e^{i\phi_jP_j}\) for a finite sequence of angles and Pauli products. Define the phase-independent exact \(n\)-copy cost by
Determine the growth of Eq. (1) with \(n\) and characterize the states for which the regularized cost
satisfies \(C_\infty(\psi)<C_1(\psi)\). For an approximation tolerance \(\varepsilon\ge0\), also determine the scaling of
where \(U\) ranges over all finite circuits of Pauli-product rotations on the \(mn\)-qubit register and \(\operatorname{cost}(U)\) is the corresponding sum of absolute rotation angles, as in Eq. (1). The question for Eq. (3) includes fixed and vanishing error sequences.
Source
The exact and approximate tensor-power preparation questions are posed in the open-problem collection of Krüger and Werner; Scarani et al. independently identify collective product-state preparation complexity as an open direction [KW05], [SIG+05].
Progress
Independent preparation gives \(C_n(\psi)\le nC_1(\psi)\). Concatenation gives \(C_{n+k}(\psi)\le C_n(\psi)+C_k(\psi)\), so Fekete’s lemma establishes the equality in Eq. (2). These elementary bounds do not decide whether the inequality can be strict.
Plesch and Brukner gave nearly optimal worst-case state-synthesis circuits on a fixed register. Their discrete local-gate count neither uses the weighted Pauli-string metric in Eq. (1) nor exploits a tensor-power promise [PB11].
Mora and Briegel related precision-dependent quantum-state algorithmic complexity to entanglement for several state families. Their framework does not determine the direct-product scaling in Eq. (3) [MB05].
Comment
The exact cost model and its approximate variant are posed in the source collection [KW05]; a cloning review also identifies product-preparation complexity as an open direction [SIG+05]. The state is known, so the problem is not universal cloning. The unresolved quantity is the collective saving in Eqs. (2) and (3) for this specific continuous gate metric.