Hardness Results for Weaver's Discrepancy Problem

Marcus, Spielman and Srivastava (Annals of Mathematics 2014) solved the Kadison--Singer Problem by proving a strong form of Weaver's conjecture: they showed that for all $α> 0$ and all lists of vectors of norm at most $\sqrtα$ whose outer products sum to the identity, there exists a signed sum of those outer products with operator norm at most $\sqrt{8 α} + 2 α.$ We prove that it is NP-hard to distinguish such a list of vectors for which there is a signed sum that equals the zero matrix from those in which every signed sum has operator norm at least $κ\sqrtα$, for some absolute constant $κ> 0.$ Thus, it is NP-hard to construct a signing that is a constant factor better than that guaranteed to exist. For $α= 1/4$, we prove that it is NP-hard to distinguish whether there is a signed sum that equals the zero matrix from the case in which every signed sum has operator norm at least $1/4$.

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