Quantum speedup in stoquastic adiabatic quantum computation (1803.09954v1)

Abstract: Quantum computation provides exponential speedup for solving certain mathematical problems against classical computers. Motivated by current rapid experimental progress on quantum computing devices, various models of quantum computation have been investigated to show quantum computational supremacy. At a commercial side, quantum annealing machine realizes the quantum Ising model with a transverse field and heuristically solves combinatorial optimization problems. The computational power of this machine is closely related to adiabatic quantum computation (AQC) with a restricted type of Hamiltonians, namely stoquastic Hamiltonians, and has been thought to be relatively less powerful compared to universal quantum computers. Little is known about computational quantum speedup nor advantage in AQC with stoquastic Hamiltonians. Here we characterize computational capability of AQC with stoquastic Hamiltonians, which we call stoqAQC. We construct a concrete stoqAQC model, whose lowest energy gap is lower bounded polynomially, and hence the final state can be obtained in polynomial time. Then we show that it can simulate universal quantum computation if adaptive single-qubit measurements in non-standard bases are allowed on the final state. Even if the measurements are restricted to non-adaptive measurements to respect the robustness of AQC, the proposed model exhibits quantum computational supremacy; classical simulation is impossible under complexity theoretical conjectures. Moreover, it is found that such a stoqAQC model can simulate Shor's algorithm and solve the factoring problem in polynomial time. We also propose how to overcome the measurement imperfections via quantum error correction within the stoqAQC model and also an experimentally feasible verification scheme to test whether or not stoqAQC is done faithfully.