A broad range of quantum optimization problems can be phrased as the question of whether a specific system has a ground state at zero energy, i.e., whether its Hamiltonian is frustration-free. Frustrationfree Hamiltonians, in turn, play a central role for constructing and understanding new phases of matter in quantum many-body physics. Unfortunately, determining whether this is the case is known to be a complexity-theoretically intractable problem. This makes it highly desirable to search for efficient heuristics and algorithms to, at least, partially answer this question. Here we prove a general criterion-a sufficient condition-under which a local Hamiltonian is guaranteed to be frustration-free by lifting Shearer's theorem from classical probability theory to the quantum world. Remarkably, evaluating this condition proceeds via a fully classical analysis of a hardcore lattice gas at negative fugacity on the Hamiltonian's interaction graph, which, as a statistical mechanics problem, is of interest in its own right. We concretely apply this criterion to local Hamiltonians on various regular lattices, while bringing to bear the tools of spin glass physics that permit us to obtain new bounds on the satisfiable to unsatisfiable transition in random quantum satisfiability. We are then led to natural conjectures for when such bounds will be tight, as well as to a novel notion of universality for these computer science problems. Besides providing concrete algorithms leading to detailed and quantitative insights, this work underscores the power of marrying classical statistical mechanics with quantum computation and complexity theory.quantum satisfiability | local Hamiltonian | hardcore lattice gas | critical exponents | universality A n overwhelming majority of systems of physical interest can be described via local Hamiltonians:[1]Here, the "k-local" operator Π i acts on a k-tuple of the microscopic degrees of freedom, best thought of as qudits for the computer scientists among our readers or spins for the physicists. The M operators define an interaction (hyper)graph G, displayed in Fig. 1. A surprisingly diverse and important class of such model Hamiltonians is defined by the additional property of being "frustrationfree": The ground state jψi of H is a simultaneous ground state of each and every Π i . This class comprises both commuting Hamiltonians-for which ½Π i , Π j = 0 ∀i, j-such as the toric code, general quantum error correcting codes, and Levin-Wen models (1-3), and noncommuting ones, such as the Affleck-Kennedy-Lieb-Tasaki (AKLT) and Rokhsar-Kivelson models (4-6). Their particular usefulness is also related to the fact that many of these examples can be viewed as "local parent Hamiltonians" for generalized matrix product states (7). In general, frustration-free conditions provide analytic control of ground state properties in otherwise largely inaccessible quantum problems.Determining whether a given Hamiltonian H is frustration-free is well known in quantum complexity theory as the quantum satisfiability...

The Lovász Local Lemma (LLL) is a powerful tool in probability theory to show the existence of combinatorial objects meeting a prescribed collection of "weakly dependent" criteria. We show that the LLL extends to a much more general geometric setting, where events are replaced with subspaces and probability is replaced with relative dimension, which allows to lower bound the dimension of the intersection of vector spaces under certain independence conditions.Our result immediately applies to the k-QSAT problem: For instance we show that any collection of rank 1 projectors with the property that each qubit appears in at most 2 k /(e · k) of them, has a joint satisfiable state.We then apply our results to the recently studied model of random k-QSAT. Recent works have shown that the satisfiable region extends up to a density of 1 in the large k limit, where the density is the ratio of projectors to qubits. Using a hybrid approach building on work by Laumann et al. [LLM + 09] we greatly extend the known satisfiable region for random k-QSAT to a density of Ω(2 k /k 2 ). Since our tool allows us to show the existence of joint satisfying states without the need to construct them, we are able to penetrate into regions where the satisfying states are conjectured to be entangled, avoiding the need to construct them, which has limited previous approaches to product states.

The security of the Bitcoin system is based on having a large amount of computational power in the hands of honest miners. Such miners are incentivized to join the system and validate transactions by the payments issued by the protocol to anyone who creates blocks. As new bitcoins creation rate decreases (halving approximately every 4 years), the revenue derived from transaction fees start to have an increasingly important role. We argue that Bitcoin's current fee market does not extract revenue well when blocks are not congested. This effect has implications for the scalability debate: revenue from transaction fees may decrease if block size is increased.The current mechanism is a "pay your bid" auction in which included transactions pay the amount they suggested. We propose two alternative auction mechanisms: The Monopolistic Price Mechanism, and the Random Sampling Optimal Price (RSOP) Mechanism (due to Goldberget al.). In the monopolistic price mechanism, the miner chooses the number of accepted transactions in the block, and all transactions pay exactly the smallest bid included in the block. The mechanism thus sets the block size dynamically (up to a bound required for fast block propagation and other security concerns). We show, using analysis and simulations, that this mechanism extracts revenue better from users, and that it is nearly incentive compatible: the profit due to strategic bidding relative to honest biding decreases as the number of bidders grows. Users can then simply set their bids truthfully to exactly the amount they are willing to pay to transact, and do not need to utilize fee estimate mechanisms, do not resort to bid shading and do not need to adjust transaction fees (via replace-by-fee mechanisms) if the mempool grows.We discuss these and other properties of our mechanisms, and explore various desired properties of fee market mechanisms for crypto-currencies. arXiv:1709.08881v1 [cs.CR] 26 Sep 2017 1 The symbol B represents 1 bitcoin. We use B or bitcoin to represent the currency, and Bitcoin to represent the Bitcoin network or the protocol.

The fisherman caught a quantum fish. Fisherman, please let me go, begged the fish, and I will grant you three wishes. The fisherman agreed. The fish gave the fisherman a quantum computer, three quantum signing tokens and his classical public key. The fish explained: to sign your three wishes, use the tokenized signature scheme on this quantum computer, then show your valid signature to the king who owes me a favor.The fisherman used one of the signing tokens to sign the document "give me a castle!" and rushed to the palace. The king executed the classical verification algorithm using the fish's public key, and since it was valid, the king complied.The fisherman's wife wanted to sign ten wishes using their two remaining signing tokens. The fisherman did not want to cheat, and secretly sailed to meet the fish. Fish, my wife wants to sign ten more wishes. But the fish was not worried: I have learned quantum cryptography following the previous story 1 . These quantum tokens are consumed during the signing. Your polynomial wife cannot even sign four wishes using the three signing tokens I gave you.How does it work? wondered the fisherman. Have you heard of quantum money? These are quantum states which can be easily verified but are hard to copy. This tokenized quantum signature scheme extends Aaronson and Christiano's quantum money scheme, which is why the signing tokens cannot be copied.Does your scheme have additional fancy properties? asked the fisherman. Yes, the scheme has other security guarantees: revocability, testability and everlasting security. Furthermore, if you're at sea and your quantum phone has only classical reception, you can use this scheme to transfer the value of the quantum money to shore, said the fish, and swam away.

The classical max-flow min-cut theorem describes transport through certain idealized classical networks. We consider the quantum analog for tensor networks. By associating an integral capacity to each edge and a tensor to each vertex in a flow network, we can also interpret it as a tensor network, and more specifically, as a linear map from the input space to the output space. The quantum max flow is defined to be the maximal rank of this linear map over all choices of tensors. The quantum min cut is defined to be the minimum product of the capacities of edges over all cuts of the tensor network. We show that unlike the classical case, the quantum max-flow=min-cut conjecture is not true in general. Under certain conditions, e.g., when the capacity on each edge is some power of a fixed integer, the quantum max-flow is proved to equal the quantum min-cut. However, concrete examples are also provided where the equality does not hold. We also found connections of quantum max-flow/min-cut with entropy of entanglement and the quantum satisfiability problem. We speculate that the phenomena revealed may be of interest both in spin systems in condensed matter and in quantum gravity.Comment: added some motivations; added references on relevant wor