Empowering quantum computation with: measurements, catalysts, and guiding states

Despite rapid advances in quantum hardware and the appearance of the first devices with active error correction by 2025, fully fault-tolerant quantum computation remains a distant milestone. This thesis investigates how additional resources can enhance computational power across various stages of quantum device development. Part I examines computation before error correction, where only constant-depth circuits are feasible. We introduce LAQCC, which augments such circuits with intermediate measurement and classical computation, and show that this model enables far more powerful computations. In Part II, we study the early fault-tolerance regime, where the main limitation is the number of logical qubits. Inspired by the classical catalytic space model, we introduce a quantum analogue in which a space-bounded quantum machine has access to an auxiliary catalytic register that may be modified during the computation but must be restored at the end. We show that this catalytic resource increases the power of quantum space-bounded machines. In Part III, we study the full fault-tolerant regime and look at the problem of estimating the ground-state energy of a Local Hamiltonian which is central to quantum chemistry. Here, we study the BQP-hard Guided Local Hamiltonian problem (estimating ground-state energy given a guiding state), showing its hardness persists over a broader parameter range. Furthermore, by introducing the Guidable Local Hamiltonian problem, we provide complexity-theoretic evidence that classical guiding-state heuristics are as powerful as quantum ones, in this setting. Finally, this problem also provides restrictions on possible gap-amplification procedures, relevant for the quantum PCP conjecture.

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