Power of Uninitialized Qubits in Shallow Quantum Circuits

We study the computational power of shallow quantum circuits with $O(\log n)$ initialized and $n^{O(1)}$ uninitialized ancillary qubits, where $n$ is the input length and the initial state of the uninitialized ancillary qubits is arbitrary. First, we show that such a circuit can compute any symmetric function on $n$ bits that is classically computable in polynomial time. Then, we regard such a circuit as an oracle and show that a polynomial-time classical algorithm with the oracle can estimate the elements of any unitary matrix corresponding to a constant-depth quantum circuit on $n$ qubits. Since it seems unlikely that these tasks can be done with only $O(\log n)$ initialized ancillary qubits, our results give evidences that adding uninitialized ancillary qubits increases the computational power of shallow quantum circuits with only $O(\log n)$ initialized ancillary qubits. Lastly, to understand the limitations of uninitialized ancillary qubits, we focus on near-logarithmic-depth quantum circuits with them and show the impossibility of computing the parity function on $n$ bits.

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