English

Complexity of Fermionic 2-SAT

Quantum Physics 2025-11-05 v3

Abstract

We introduce the fermionic satisfiability problem, Fermionic kk-SAT: this is the problem of deciding whether there is a fermionic state in the null-space of a collection of fermionic, parity-conserving, projectors on nn fermionic modes, where each fermionic projector involves at most kk fermionic modes. We prove that this problem can be solved efficiently classically for k=2k=2. In addition, we show that deciding whether there exists a satisfying assignment with a given fixed particle number parity can also be done efficiently classically for Fermionic 2-SAT: this problem is a quantum-fermionic extension of asking whether a classical 2-SAT problem has a solution with a given Hamming weight parity. We also prove that deciding whether there exists a satisfying assignment for particle-number-conserving Fermionic 2-SAT for some given particle number is NP-complete. Complementary to this, we show that Fermionic 9-SAT is QMA1_1-hard.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2412.06383,
  title  = {Complexity of Fermionic 2-SAT},
  author = {Maarten Stroeks and Barbara M. Terhal},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2412.06383},
  year   = {2025}
}

Comments

Fixed abstract for v2

R2 v1 2026-06-28T20:27:43.151Z