On estimating operator norm distance, with optimal trace distance estimation when one state is pure

Abstract

We investigate the computational complexity of estimating the operator norm distance ${\rm T}_{\infty}(\rho_0,\rho_1)$, defined via the operator norm $\|A\|_{\infty} = \sigma_{\max}(A)$, given ${\rm poly}(n)$-size state-preparation circuits of $n$-qubit quantum states $\rho_0$ and $\rho_1$. We provide efficient quantum estimators for the operator norm distance whose complexity is independent of the rank (and thus the dimension) of the states: 1. When one state is pure, we establish an optimal quantum estimator using $\Theta(1/\epsilon)$ queries to the state-preparation circuits. Consequently, for constant additive error, say $\epsilon=1/5$, our estimator runs in ${\rm poly}(n)$ time. Since the operator norm distance ${\rm T}_{\infty}(|\psi\rangle\!\langle\psi|,\rho)$ is exactly half of the trace distance ${\rm T}(|\psi\rangle\!\langle\psi|,\rho)$, our result also gives rank-independent query complexity for estimating both quantities, whereas the approaches due to van Apeldoorn, Cornelissen, Gily{\'{e}}n, and Nannicini (SODA 2023) and Wang and Zhang (TIT 2024) have query complexity scaling at least linearly with ${\rm rank}(\rho)$, which can be $\exp(n)$ in general. 2. For general quantum states, we also provide a quantum estimator using $\widetilde{O}(1/\epsilon^{3/2})$ queries to the state-preparation circuits, which shows that the corresponding promise problem is ${\sf BQP}$-complete and improves the ${\sf QMA}$ upper bound sketched by Liu and Wang (ESA 2025). Together with an $\Omega(1/\epsilon)$ quantum query complexity lower bound, this leaves only square-root room for improvement. The key intuition behind our estimators is that, when one state is pure, the pure state $|\psi\rangle$ has overlap at least $1/2$ with the top unit eigenvector of $|\psi\rangle\!\langle\psi|-\rho$, reflecting a structural feature specific to the operator norm distance.