Abstract
We present a classical protocol to efficiently simulate any pure-state quantum computation that involves only a restricted amount of entanglement. More generally, we show how to classically simulate pure-state quantum computations on qubits by using computational resources that grow linearly in and exponentially in the amount of entanglement in the quantum computer. Our results imply that a necessary condition for an exponential computational speedup (with respect to classical computations) is that the amount of entanglement increases with the size of the computation, and provide an explicit lower bound on the required growth.
- Received 25 February 2003
DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevLett.91.147902
©2003 American Physical Society