The computational power of normalizer circuits over black-box groups

This work presents a precise connection between Clifford circuits, Shor’s factoring algorithm and several other famous quantum algorithms with exponential quantum speed-ups for solving Abelian hidden subgroup problems. We show that all these different forms of quantum computation belong to a common new restricted model of quantum operations that we call black-box normalizer circuits. To define these, we extend the previous model of normalizer circuits [1–3], which are built of quantum Fourier transforms, group automorphism and quadratic phase gates associated with an Abelian group G. In [1–3], the group is always given in an explicitly decomposed form. In our model, we remove this assumption and allow G to be a black-box group [4]. While standard normalizer circuits were shown to be efficiently classically simulable [1–3], we find that normalizer circuits are powerful enough to factorize and solve classically-hard problems in the black-box setting. We further set upper limits to their computational power by showing that decomposing finite Abelian groups is complete for the associated complexity class. In particular, solving this problem renders black-box normalizer circuits efficiently classically simulable by exploiting the generalized stabilizer formalism in [1–3]. Lastly, we employ our connection to draw a few practical implications for quantum algorithm design: namely, we give a no-go theorem for finding new quantum algorithms with black-box normalizer circuits, a universality result for low-depth normalizer circuits, and identify two other complete problems.