English

Possibilistic simulation of quantum circuits by classical circuits

Quantum Physics 2022-12-23 v4

Abstract

In breakthrough work, Bravyi, Gosset, and K\"{o}nig (BGK) [Science, 2018] unconditionally proved that constant depth quantum circuits are more powerful than their classical counterparts. Their result is equivalent to saying that a particular family of constant depth quantum circuits takes classical circuits at least Ω(logn)\Omega(\log n) depth to "simulate", in a certain sense. In our paper, we formalise their sense of simulation, which we call "possibilistic simulation" or "p-simulation", and construct explicit classical circuits that can p-simulate any depth-dd quantum circuit with Clifford and tt TT-gates in depth O(d+t)O(d+t). Our classical circuits use {NOT, AND, OR}\{\text{NOT, AND, OR}\} gates of fan-in 2\leq 2.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1904.05282,
  title  = {Possibilistic simulation of quantum circuits by classical circuits},
  author = {Daochen Wang},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1904.05282},
  year   = {2022}
}

Comments

8 pages; v2: major revision of v1 claims due to circuit depth costing error, cf. footnote 29; v3: reverted title back to v1's, refined main theorem statement, and improved presentation; v4: added comparison to weak and strong simulation, further improved presentation

R2 v1 2026-06-23T08:35:39.108Z