Certifying Quantum Optimization and Circuit Cutting by Using Quantum-Classical Moment Duality

Abstract

We establish a direct quantum--classical duality based on the degree-$2$ Sum-of-Squares (SoS) semidefinite programming cone: the matrix of two-qubit Pauli-$Z$ correlation functions obtained from \textbf{any} quantum state $\rho$ is automatically a feasible point of the classical Goemans--Williamson (GW) relaxation. This observation provides a universal safety net for variational quantum optimization algorithms: applying GW random hyperplane rounding to the quantum-driven moment matrix yields a certified expected cut value bounded below by $\alpha_{\text{GW}} \langle \mathcal{H} \rangle_\rho$, which holds for every state generated by variational algorithms such as the Quantum Alternating Operator Ansatz (QAOA) or the Variational Quantum Power Method (VQPM), regardless of convergence quality. We further show that the same moment matrix reveals the tensor-product structure of the underlying unitary circuit, enabling a polynomial-time, correlation-based circuit cutting procedure with rigorous error bounds. The framework is validated numerically on Max-Cut instances for variational algorithms and on random states for circuit cutting, demonstrating that two-point correlation data are sufficient to locate near-optimal bipartitions while theoretical error bounds hold in practice.