How to Construct Random Unitaries
Abstract
The existence of pseudorandom unitaries (PRUs) -- efficient quantum circuits that are computationally indistinguishable from Haar-random unitaries -- has been a central open question, with significant implications for cryptography, complexity theory, and fundamental physics. In this work, we close this question by proving that PRUs exist, assuming that any quantum-secure one-way function exists. We establish this result for both (1) the standard notion of PRUs, which are secure against any efficient adversary that makes queries to the unitary , and (2) a stronger notion of PRUs, which are secure even against adversaries that can query both the unitary and its inverse . In the process, we prove that any algorithm that makes queries to a Haar-random unitary can be efficiently simulated on a quantum computer, up to inverse-exponential trace distance.
Cite
@article{arxiv.2410.10116,
title = {How to Construct Random Unitaries},
author = {Fermi Ma and Hsin-Yuan Huang},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2410.10116},
year = {2025}
}
Comments
76 pages; moved grant acknowledgments to acknowledgments section