Detecting mixed-unitary quantum channels is NP-hard

02/08/2019

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by   Colin Do-Yan Lee, et al.

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A quantum channel is said to be a mixed-unitary channel if it can be expressed as a convex combination of unitary channels. We prove that, given the Choi representation of a quantum channel, it is NP-hard with respect to polynomial-time Turing reductions to determine whether or not that channel is a mixed-unitary channel. This hardness result holds even under the assumption that the channel is not within an inverse-polynomial distance (in the dimension of the space upon which it acts) of the boundary of the mixed-unitary channels.