Solitude verification is arguably one of the simplest fundamental problems in distributed computing, where the goal is to verify that there is a unique contender in a network. This paper devises a quantum algorithm that exactly solves the problem on an anonymous network, which is known as a network model with minimal assumptions [Angluin, STOC'80]. The algorithm runs in @math rounds if every party initially has the common knowledge of an upper bound @math on the number of parties. This implies that all solvable problems can be solved in @math rounds on average without error (i.e., with zero-sided error) on the network. As a generalization, a quantum algorithm that works in @math rounds is obtained for the problem of exactly computing any symmetric Boolean function, over @math distributed input bits, which is constant over all the @math bits whose sum is larger than @math for @math . All these algorithms work with the bit complexities bounded by a polynomial in @math .
Pal, Singh, and Kumar @cite_19 and D'Hondt and Panangaden @cite_6 dealt with @math and the GHZ-state sharing problem in a different setting, where pre-shared entanglement is assumed but only classical communication is allowed. The relation between several network models that differ in available quantum resources has been discussed by Gavoille, Kosowski, and Markiewicz @cite_17 . Recently, @cite_13 proved that quantum communication cannot substantially speed up algorithms for some fundamental problems, such as the minimum spanning tree, compared to the classical setting. For fault-tolerant distributed quantum computing, the Byzantine agreement problem and the consensus problem were studied by Ben-Or and Hassidim @cite_28 and Chlebus, Kowalski, and Strojnowski @cite_8 , respectively. In the cryptographic context where there are cheating parties, Refs. @cite_21 @cite_15 devises quantum algorithms that elect a unique leader with a small bias. Some quantum distributed protocols were experimentally demonstrated by @cite_30 and @cite_3 .
@cite_30 @cite_8 @cite_28 @cite_21 @cite_6 @cite_3 @cite_19 @cite_15 @cite_13 @cite_17
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It is well understood that the use of quantum entanglement significantly enhances the computational power of systems. Much of the attention has focused on Bell states and their multipartite generalizations. However, in the multipartite case it is known that there are several inequivalent classes of states, such as those represented by the W-state and the GHZ-state. Our main contribution is a demonstration of the special computational power of these states in the context of paradigmatic problems from classical distributed computing. Concretely, we show that the W-state is the only pure state that can be used to exactly solve the problem of leader election in anonymous quantum networks. Similarly we show that the GHZ-state is the only one that can be used to solve the problem of distributed consensus when no classical post-processing is considered. These results generalize to a family of W- and GHZ-like states. At the heart of the proofs of these impossibility results lie symmetry arguments. We study the problem of k-pair communication (or multiple unicast problem) of quantum information in networks of quantum channels. We consider the asymptotic rates of high fidelity quantum communication between specific sender-receiver pairs. Four scenarios of classical communication assistance (none, forward, backward, and two-way) are considered. (I) We obtain outer and inner bounds of the achievable rate regions in the most general directed networks. (II) For two particular networks (including the butterfly network), routing is proved optimal, and the free assisting classical communication can at best be used to modify the directions of quantum channels in the network. Consequently, the achievable rate regions are given by counting edge avoiding paths, and precise achievable rate regions in all four assisting scenarios can be obtained. (III) Optimality of routing can also be proved in classes of networks. The first class consists of directed unassisted networks in which (1) the receivers are information sinks, (2) the maximum distance from senders to receivers is small, and (3) a certain type of 4-cycles are absent, but without further constraints (such as on the number of communicating and intermediate parties). The second class consists of arbitrary backward-assisted networks with two sender-receiver pairs. (IV) Beyond the k-pair communication problem, observations are made on quantum multicasting and a static version of network communication related to the entanglement of assistance. In this paper we show that sufficient multi-partite quantum entanglement helps in fair and unbiased election of a leader in a distributed network of processors with only linear classical communication complexity. We show that a total of @math distinct multi-partite maximally entanglement sets (ebits) are capable of supporting such a protocol in the presence of nodes that may lie and thus be biased. Here, @math is the number of nodes in the network. We also demonstrate the difficulty of performing unbiased and fair election of a leader with linear classical communication complexity in the absence of quantum entanglement even if all nodes have perfect random bit generators. We show that the presence of a sufficient number @math of biased agents leads to a non-zero limiting probability of biased election of the leader, whereas, the presence of a smaller number @math of biased agents matters little. We define two new related complexity classes motivated by the our leader election problem and discuss a few open questions. We study shared randomness in the context of multi-party number-in-hand communication protocols in the simultaneous message passing model. We show that with three or more players, shared randomness exhibits new interesting properties that have no direct analogues in the two-party case. First, we demonstrate a hierarchy of modes of shared randomness, with the usual shared randomness where all parties access the same random string as the strongest form in the hierarchy. We show exponential separations between its levels, and some of our bounds may be of independent interest. For example, we show that the equality function can be solved by a protocol of constant length using the weakest form of shared randomness, which we call "XOR-shared randomness." Second, we show that quantum communication cannot replace shared randomness in the k-party case, where k >= 3 is any constant. We demonstrate a promise function GP_k that can be computed by a classical protocol of constant length when (the strongest form of) shared randomness is available, but any quantum protocol without shared randomness must send n^Omega(1) qubits to compute it. Moreover, the quantum complexity of GP_k remains n^Omega(1) even if the "second strongest" mode of shared randomness is available. While a somewhat similar separation was already known in the two-party case, in the multi-party case our statement is qualitatively stronger: * In the two-party case, only a relational communication problem with similar properties is known. * In the two-party case, the gap between the two complexities of a problem can be at most exponential, as it is known that 2^(O(c)) log n qubits can always replace shared randomness in any c-bit protocol. Our bounds imply that with quantum communication alone, in general, it is not possible to simulate efficiently even a three-bit three-party classical protocol that uses shared randomness. Shor and Preskill (see Phys. Rev. Lett., vol.85, p.441, 2000) have provided a simple proof of security of the standard quantum key distribution scheme by Bennett and Brassard (1984) by demonstrating a connection between key distribution and entanglement purification protocols (EPPs) with one-way communications. Here, we provide proofs of security of standard quantum key distribution schemes, Bennett and Brassard and the six-state scheme, against the most general attack, by using the techniques of two-way entanglement purification. We demonstrate clearly the advantage of classical post-processing with two-way classical communications over classical post-processing with only one-way classical communications in quantum key distribution (QKD). This is done by the explicit construction of a new protocol for (the error correction detection and privacy amplification of) Bennett and Brassard that can tolerate a bit error rate of up to 18.9 , which is higher than what any Bennett and Brassard scheme with only one-way classical communications can possibly tolerate. Moreover, we demonstrate the advantage of the six-state scheme over Bennett and Brassard by showing that the six-state scheme can strictly tolerate a higher bit error rate than Bennett and Brassard. In particular, our six-state protocol can tolerate a bit error rate of 26.4 , which is higher than the upper bound of 25 bit error rate for any secure Bennett and Brassard protocol. Consequently, our protocols may allow higher key generation rate and remain secure over longer distances than previous protocols. Our investigation suggests that two-way entanglement purification is a useful tool in the study of advantage distillation, error correction, and privacy amplification protocols. After carrying out a protocol for quantum key agreement over a noisy quantum channel, the parties Alice and Bob must process the raw key in order to end up with identical keys about which the adversary has virtually no information. In principle, both classical and quantum protocols can be used for this processing. It is a natural question which type of protocols is more powerful. We show that the limits of tolerable noise are identical for classical and quantum protocols in many cases. More specifically, we prove that a quantum state between two parties is entangled if and only if the classical random variables resulting from optimal measurements provide some mutual classical information between the parties. In addition, we present evidence which strongly suggests that the potentials of classical and of quantum protocols are equal in every situation. An important consequence, in the purely classical regime, of such a correspondence would be the existence of a classical counterpart of so-called bound entanglement, namely "bound information" that cannot be used for generating a secret key by any protocol. This stands in sharp contrast to what was previously believed. We study a model of communication complexity that encompasses many well-studied problems, including classical and quantum communication complexity, the complexity of simulating distributions arising from bipartite measurements of shared quantum states, and XOR games. In this model, Alice gets an input x, Bob gets an input y, and their goal is to each produce an output a, b distributed according to some pre-specified joint distribution p(a, b|x, y). Our results apply to any non-signaling distribution, that is, those where Alice's marginal distribution does not depend on Bob's input, and vice versa. By taking a geometric view of the non-signaling distributions, we introduce a simple new technique based on affine combinations of lower-complexity distributions, and we give the first general technique to apply to all these settings, with elementary proofs and very intuitive interpretations. Specifically, we introduce two complexity measures, one which gives lower bounds on classical communication, and one for quantum communication. These measures can be expressed as convex optimization problems. We show that the dual formulations have a striking interpretation, since they coincide with maximum violations of Bell and Tsirelson inequalities. The dual expressions are closely related to the winning probability of XOR games. Despite their apparent simplicity, these lower bounds subsume many known communication complexity lower bound methods, most notably the recent lower bounds of Linial and Shraibman for the special case of Boolean functions. We show that as in the case of Boolean functions, the gap between the quantum and classical lower bounds is at most linear in the size of the support of the distribution, and does not depend on the size of the inputs. This translates into a bound on the gap between maximal Bell and Tsirelson inequality violations, which was previously known only for the case of distributions with Boolean outcomes and uniform marginals. It also allows us to show that for some distributions, information theoretic methods are necessary to prove strong lower bounds. Finally, we give an exponential upper bound on quantum and classical communication complexity in the simultaneous messages model, for any non-signaling distribution. One consequence of this is a simple proof that any quantum distribution can be approximated with a constant number of bits of communication. Recent advances in theoretical and experimental quantum computing bring us closer to scalable quantum computing devices. This makes the need for protocols that verify the correct functionality of quantum operations timely and has led to the field of quantum verification. In this paper we address key challenges to make quantum verification protocols applicable to experimental implementations. We prove the robustness of the single server verifiable universal blind quantum computing protocol of Fitzsimons and Kashefi (2012 arXiv:1203.5217) in the most general scenario. This includes the case where the purification of the deviated input state is in the hands of an adversarial server. The proved robustness property allows the composition of this protocol with a device-independent state tomography protocol that we give, which is based on the rigidity of CHSH games as proposed by (2013 Nature 496 456–60). The resulting composite protocol has lower round complexity for the verification of entangled quantum servers with a classical verifier and, as we show, can be made fault tolerant. We consider the scenario where Alice wants to send a secret (classical) @math -bit message to Bob using a classical key, and where only one-way transmission from Alice to Bob is possible. In this case, quantum communication cannot help to obtain perfect secrecy with key length smaller then @math . We study the question of whether there might still be fundamental differences between the case where quantum as opposed to classical communication is used. In this direction, we show that there exist ciphers with perfect security producing quantum ciphertext where, even if an adversary knows the plaintext and applies an optimal measurement on the ciphertext, his Shannon uncertainty about the key used is almost maximal. This is in contrast to the classical case where the adversary always learns @math bits of information on the key in a known plaintext attack. We also show that there is a limit to how different the classical and quantum cases can be: the most probable key, given matching plain- and ciphertexts, has the same probability in both the quantum and the classical cases. We suggest an application of our results in the case where only a short secret key is available and the message is much longer. Although a quantum state requires exponentially many classical bits to describe, the laws of quantum mechanics impose severe restrictions on how that state can be accessed. This paper shows in three settings that quantum messages have only limited advantages over classical ones. First, we show that BQP qpoly is contained in PP poly, where BQP qpoly is the class of problems solvable in quantum polynomial time, given a polynomial-size "quantum advice state" that depends only on the input length. This resolves a question of Buhrman, and means that we should not hope for an unrelativized separation between quantum and classical advice. Underlying our complexity result is a general new relation between deterministic and quantum one-way communication complexities, which applies to partial as well as total functions. Second, we construct an oracle relative to which NP is not contained in BQP qpoly. To do so, we use the polynomial method to give the first correct proof of a direct product theorem for quantum search. This theorem has other applications; for example, it can be used to fix a flawed result of Klauck about quantum time-space tradeoffs for sorting. Third, we introduce a new trace distance method for proving lower bounds on quantum one-way communication complexity. Using this method, we obtain optimal quantum lower bounds for two problems of Ambainis, for which no nontrivial lower bounds were previously known even for classical randomized protocols.