Distributed quantum algorithm for divergence estimation and beyond
With the rapid advancement of quantum information technology, designing efficient distributed quantum algorithms to perform various information processing tasks remains challenging. In this paper, we consider a distributed scenario where two parties, Alice and Bob, given access to matrices $A$ and $B$ respectively, aim to estimate ${\rm Tr}(f(A)g(B))$, where $f$ and $g$ are known functions. In this task, only local quantum operations, classical communication and single-qubit measurements are allowed due to the high cost of quantum communication and entangled measurements. We propose a distributed quantum algorithm framework to compute ${\rm Tr}(f(A)g(B))$ within an additive error $\varepsilon$. The proposed algorithm framework requires $\widetilde{O}\left(d^2 / (\delta \varepsilon^2)\right)$ quantum queries and two-qubit gates, assuming that the minimum singular value of each matrix $A, B \in \mathbb{C}^{d \times d}$ is at least $\delta$. Additionally, our algorithm framework uses a simple Hadamard test architecture, enabling easier quantum hardware implementation. This algorithm framework allows for various applications including quantum divergence estimation, distributed solving of linear system, and distributed Hamiltonian simulation, while preserving the privacy of both parties. Furthermore, we establish a lower bound of $\Omega\left(\max\left\{1 /\varepsilon^2, \sqrt{dr}/\varepsilon\right\}\right)$ on the query complexity for the task, where $r$ denotes the rank of the input matrices. We believe this framework holds broad applicability across a range of distributed quantum computing tasks.