Single-qubit gate teleportation provides a quantum advantage

Libor Caha, Xavier Coiteux-Roy, and Robert Koenig

School of Computation, Information and Technology, Technical University of Munich, Germany
Munich Center for Quantum Science and Technology, Munich, Germany

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Abstract

Gate-teleportation circuits are arguably among the most basic examples of computations believed to provide a quantum computational advantage: In seminal work [1], Terhal and DiVincenzo have shown that these circuits elude simulation by efficient classical algorithms under plausible complexity-theoretic assumptions. Here we consider possibilistic simulation [2], a particularly weak form of this task where the goal is to output any string appearing with non-zero probability in the output distribution of the circuit. We show that even for single-qubit Clifford-gate-teleportation circuits this simulation problem cannot be solved by constant-depth classical circuits with bounded fan-in gates. Our results are unconditional and are obtained by a reduction to the problem of computing the parity, a well-studied problem in classical circuit complexity.

We compare classical and quantum shallow-depth circuits and show that the latter are strictly more powerful computationally. To this end, we give a computational problem that can be solved by a shallow-depth quantum circuit but that cannot be solved by any shallow-depth classical circuit with bounded fan-in gates. This new unconditional proof of a quantum advantage has two distinguishing features: First, the quantum circuit we use is extremely simple. It is based on a parallel application of gate teleportation, a widely used primitive in quantum computing. Second, our proof technique relies on classical circuit complexity lower bounds rather than on the violation of Bell inequalities typical to previous works. Our work thus provides new insights into the origins of quantum computational power.

► BibTeX data

► References

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Cited by

[1] Dilip Paneru, Francesco Di Colandrea, Alessio D'Errico, and Ebrahim Karimi, "Nonlocal transfer of high-dimensional unitary operations", Quantum 9, 1855 (2025).

[2] Libor Caha, Xavier Coiteux-Roy, and Robert Koenig, "3D-local noisy shallow quantum circuits defeat unbounded fan-in classical circuits", Nature Communications 17 1, 8174 (2026).

[3] Adam Bene Watts, David Gosset, Yinchen Liu, and Mehdi Soleimanifar, "Quantum Advantage from Measurement-Induced Entanglement in Random Shallow Circuits", PRX Quantum 6 1, 010356 (2025).

[4] Michael de Oliveira, Luís S. Barbosa, and Ernesto F. Galvão, "Quantum advantage in temporally flat measurement-based quantum computation", Quantum 8, 1312 (2024).

[5] Libor Caha, Xavier Coiteux-Roy, and Robert Koenig, "A colossal advantage: 3D-local noisy shallow quantum circuits defeat unbounded fan-in classical circuits", arXiv:2312.09209, (2023).

[6] Austin K. Daniel and Akimasa Miyake, "Quantum algorithms for classical Boolean functions via adaptive measurements: Exponential reductions in space-time resources", arXiv:2211.01252, (2022).

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