English

Detecting mixed-unitary quantum channels is NP-hard

Quantum Physics 2020-04-22 v3 Computational Complexity

Abstract

A quantum channel is said to be a mixed-unitary channel if it can be expressed as a convex combination of unitary channels. We prove that, given the Choi representation of a quantum channel, it is NP-hard with respect to polynomial-time Turing reductions to determine whether or not that channel is a mixed-unitary channel. This hardness result holds even under the assumption that the channel is not within an inverse-polynomial distance (in the dimension of the space upon which it acts) of the boundary of the mixed-unitary channels.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1902.03164,
  title  = {Detecting mixed-unitary quantum channels is NP-hard},
  author = {Colin Do-Yan Lee and John Watrous},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1902.03164},
  year   = {2020}
}

Comments

24 pages

R2 v1 2026-06-23T07:35:53.915Z