Published July 20, 2011 | Version Published + Supplemental Material
Journal Article Open

Computational Difficulty of Computing the Density of States

  • 1. ROR icon University of Virginia
  • 2. ROR icon Perimeter Institute
  • 3. ROR icon California Institute of Technology

Abstract

We study the computational difficulty of computing the ground state degeneracy and the density of states for local Hamiltonians. We show that the difficulty of both problems is exactly captured by a class which we call #BQP, which is the counting version of the quantum complexity class quantum Merlin Arthur. We show that #BQP is not harder than its classical counting counterpart #P, which in turn implies that computing the ground state degeneracy or the density of states for classical Hamiltonians is just as hard as it is for quantum Hamiltonians.

Additional Information

© 2011 American Physical Society. Received 26 October 2010; revised 28 May 2011; published 20 July 2011. We thank S. Aaronson, D. Gottesman, D. Gross, Y. Shi, M. van den Nest, J. Watrous, and S. Zhang for helpful discussions and comments. Research at PI is supported by Industry Canada and Ontario MRI. N. S. is supported by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation through Caltech's Center for the Physics of Information and NSF Grant No. PHY-0803371.

Attached Files

Published - Brown2011p15420Phys_Rev_Lett.pdf

Supplemental Material - README.TXT

Supplemental Material - supplement-v2.pdf

Supplemental Material - supplement-v2.tex

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Additional details

Identifiers

Eprint ID
24727
Resolver ID
CaltechAUTHORS:20110808-100520724

Funding

Industry Canada
Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation
NSF
PHY-0803371
Ontario MRI

Dates

Created
2011-08-08
Created from EPrint's datestamp field
Updated
2021-11-09
Created from EPrint's last_modified field

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