Optimal Trace Distance and Fidelity Estimations for Pure Quantum States

Abstract: Measuring the distinguishability between quantum states is a basic problem in quantum information theory. In this paper, we develop optimal quantum algorithms that estimate both the trace distance and the (square root) fidelity between pure states to within additive error $\varepsilon$ using $\Theta(1/\varepsilon)$ queries to their state-preparation circuits, quadratically improving the long-standing folklore $O(1/\varepsilon^2)$. At the heart of our construction, is an algorithmic tool for quantum square root amplitude estimation, which generalizes the well-known quantum amplitude estimation.