English

Phase transitions and random quantum satisfiability

Quantum Physics 2010-04-29 v1 Disordered Systems and Neural Networks Statistical Mechanics Computational Complexity

Abstract

Alongside the effort underway to build quantum computers, it is important to better understand which classes of problems they will find easy and which others even they will find intractable. We study random ensembles of the QMA1_1-complete quantum satisfiability (QSAT) problem introduced by Bravyi. QSAT appropriately generalizes the NP-complete classical satisfiability (SAT) problem. We show that, as the density of clauses/projectors is varied, the ensembles exhibit quantum phase transitions between phases that are satisfiable and unsatisfiable. Remarkably, almost all instances of QSAT for any hypergraph exhibit the same dimension of the satisfying manifold. This establishes the QSAT decision problem as equivalent to a, potentially new, graph theoretic problem and that the hardest typical instances are likely to be localized in a bounded range of clause density.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.0903.1904,
  title  = {Phase transitions and random quantum satisfiability},
  author = {C. R. Laumann and R. Moessner and A. Scardicchio and S. L. Sondhi},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:0903.1904},
  year   = {2010}
}

Comments

9 pages, 3 figures

R2 v1 2026-06-21T12:20:34.781Z