Hardness of classically simulating quantum circuits with unbounded Toffoli and fan-out gates

Abstract

We study the classical simulatability of constant-depth polynomial-size quantum circuits followed by only one single-qubit measurement, where the circuits consist of universal gates on at most two qubits and additional gates on an unbounded number of qubits. First, we consider unbounded Toffoli gates as additional gates and deal with the weak simulation, i.e., sampling the output probability distribution. We show that there exists a constant-depth quantum circuit with only one unbounded Toffoli gate that is not weakly simulatable, unless BQP ⊆ PostBPP ∩ AM. Then, we consider unbounded fan-out gates as additional gates and deal with the strong simulation, i.e., computing the output probability. We show that there exists a constant-depth quantum circuit with only two unbounded fan-out gates that is not strongly simulatable, unless P = PP. These results are in contrast to the fact that any constant-depth quantum circuit without additional gates on an unbounded number of qubits is strongly and weakly simulatable.