English

Lower bounds on non-local computation from controllable correlation

Quantum Physics 2026-05-01 v4

Abstract

Understanding entanglement cost in non-local quantum computation (NLQC) is relevant to complexity, cryptography, gravity, and other areas. This entanglement cost is largely uncharacterized; previous lower bound techniques apply to narrowly defined cases, and proving lower bounds on most simple unitaries has remained open. Here, we give two new lower bound techniques that can be evaluated for any unitary, based on their controllable correlation and controllable entanglement. For Haar random two qubit unitaries, our techniques typically lead to non-trivial lower bounds. Further, we obtain lower bounds on most of the commonly studied two qubit quantum gates, including CNOT, DCNOT, SWAP\sqrt{\text{SWAP}}, and the XX interaction, none of which previously had known lower bounds. For the CNOT gate, one of our techniques gives a tight lower bound, fully resolving its entanglement cost. The resulting lower bounds have parallel repetition properties, and apply in the noisy setting.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2602.00255,
  title  = {Lower bounds on non-local computation from controllable correlation},
  author = {Richard Cleve and Alex May},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2602.00255},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

v4 includes a number of further minor corrections over v3

R2 v1 2026-07-01T09:28:40.155Z