English

Parity $\notin$ QAC0 $\iff$ QAC0 is Fourier-Concentrated

Quantum Physics 2026-04-06 v1 Computational Complexity

Abstract

A major open problem in understanding shallow quantum circuits (QAC0^0) is whether they can compute Parity. We show that this question is solely about the Fourier spectrum of QAC0^0: any QAC0^0 circuit with non-negligible high-level Fourier mass suffices to exactly compute PARITY in QAC0^0. Thus, proving a quantum analog of the seminal LMN theorem for AC0^0 is necessary to bound the quantum circuit complexity of PARITY. In the other direction, LMN does not fully capture the limitations of AC0^0. For example, despite MAJORITY having 99%99\% of its weight on low-degree Fourier coefficients, no AC0^0 circuit can non-trivially correlate with it. In contrast, we provide a QAC0^0 circuit that achieves (1o(1))(1-o(1)) correlation with MAJORITY, establishing the first average-case decision separation between AC0^0 and QAC0^0. This suggests a uniquely quantum phenomenon: unlike in the classical setting, Fourier concentration may largely characterize the power of QAC0^0. PARITY is also known to be equivalent in QAC0^0 to inherently quantum tasks such as preparing GHZ states to high fidelity. We extend this equivalence to a broad class of state-synthesis tasks. We demonstrate that existing metrics such as trace distance, fidelity, and mutual information are insufficient to capture these states and introduce a new measure, felinity. We prove that preparing any state with non-negligible felinity, or derived states such as poly(n)-weight Dicke states, implies PARITY \in QAC0^0.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2604.02793,
  title  = {Parity $\notin$ QAC0 $\iff$ QAC0 is Fourier-Concentrated},
  author = {Lucas Gretta and Meghal Gupta and Malvika Raj Joshi},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2604.02793},
  year   = {2026}
}