Tight Bound for Quantum Unitary Time-Reversal

Abstract: Time-reversal of unitary evolution is fundamental in quantum information processing. Many scenarios, particularly those in quantum learning and metrology, assume free access to the time-reverse of an unknown unitary. In this paper, we settle the query complexity of the unitary time-reversal task: approximately implementing $U^{-1}$ given only black-box access to an unknown $d$-dimensional unitary $U$. We provide a tight query lower bound $\Omega((1-\epsilon)d^2)$ for the unitary time-reversal to within diamond norm error $\epsilon$. Notably, our lower bound applies to general coherent protocols with unbounded ancillas, and holds even when $\epsilon$ is an average-case distance error. Moreover, our result implies a query lower bound $\Omega(d^2)$ for approximately implementing control-$U$ up to an irrelevant phase, which is also tight with respect to the dimension.