Dominik Leichtle

Alex Rice, Dominik Leichtle, Kim Worrall et al.

Many production quantum programming languages represent hybrid quantum computations by extending a classical base language with a quantum effect, where qubits are addressed by reference, and quantum operations are understood to mutate some external quantum state. However, the semantics of this view of quantum computation remains underdeveloped, especially when the language allows mid-circuit measurements and non-termination. In this work, we provide a general method for building denotational semantics for such languages, by defining the quantum orchestra monad, which precisely captures this style of quantum effect. The monad has a concrete presentation, being based on the formalism of quantum instruments, a common tool in quantum information theory for capturing the action of a quantum process along with its classical outcomes. It acts on the category DCPO, and so enables the interpretation of divergent hybrid programs. The quantum orchestra monad serves as a natural extension of both the classical state monad and the probabilistic powerdomain monad. We investigate some of the subtleties present when trying to naïvely extend these definitions to the quantum non-commutative case.

Elham Kashefi, Dominik Leichtle, Luka Music et al.

Recent experimental achievements motivate an ever-growing interest from companies starting to feel the limitations of classical computing. Yet, in light of ongoing privacy scandals, the future availability of quantum computing through remotely accessible servers pose peculiar challenges: Clients with quantum-limited capabilities want their data and algorithms to remain hidden, while being able to verify that their computations are performed correctly. Research in blind and verifiable delegation of quantum computing attempts to address this question. However, available techniques suffer not only from high overheads but also from over-sensitivity: When running on noisy devices, imperfections trigger the same detection mechanisms as malicious attacks, resulting in perpetually aborted computations. Hence, while malicious quantum computers are rendered harmless by blind and verifiable protocols, inherent noise severely limits their usability. We address this problem with an efficient, robust, blind, verifiable scheme to delegate deterministic quantum computations with classical inputs and outputs. We show that: 1) a malicious Server can cheat at most with an exponentially small success probability; 2) in case of sufficiently small noise, the protocol succeeds with a probability exponentially close to 1; 3) the overhead is barely a polynomial number of repetitions of the initial computation interleaved with test runs requiring the same physical resources in terms of memory and gates; 4) the amount of tolerable noise, measured by the probability of failing a test run, can be as high as 25% for some computations and will be generally bounded by 12.5% when using a planar graph resource state. The key points are that security can be provided without universal computation graphs and that, in our setting, full fault-tolerance is not needed to amplify the confidence level exponentially close to 1.