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arXiv · 1904.05282

Possibilistic simulation of quantum circuits by classical circuits

Daochen Wang
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Abstract

In breakthrough work, Bravyi, Gosset, and K\"{o}nig (BGK) [Science, 2018] unconditionally proved that constant depth quantum circuits are more powerful than their classical counterparts. Their result is equivalent to saying that a particular family of constant depth quantum circuits takes classical circuits at least $\Omega(\log n)$ depth to "simulate", in a certain sense. In our paper, we formalise their sense of simulation, which we call "possibilistic simulation" or "p-simulation", and construct explicit classical circuits that can p-simulate any depth-$d$ quantum circuit with Clifford and $t$ $T$-gates in depth $O(d+t)$. Our classical circuits use $\{\text{NOT, AND, OR}\}$ gates of fan-in $\leq 2$.

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Daochen Wang. 2019-04-10. Possibilistic simulation of quantum circuits by classical circuits. https://doi.org/10.1103/physreva.106.062430

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