Symmetric quantum computation

Abstract: We introduce a systematic study of "symmetric quantum circuits", a restricted model of quantum computation where the restriction is symmetry-based. This model is well-adapted for studying the role of symmetries in quantum speedups, and it extends a powerful notion of symmetric computation studied in the classical setting. We show that symmetric quantum circuits go beyond the capabilities of their classical counterparts by efficiently implementing key quantum subroutines such as amplitude amplification and phase estimation, as well as the linear combination of unitaries technique. In addition, we consider the task of symmetric state preparation and show that it can be performed efficiently in several interesting and nontrivial cases.