We consider computation in the presence of closed timelike curves (CTCs), as proposed by Deutsch. We focus on the case in which the CTCs carry classical bits (as opposed to qubits). Previously, Aaronson and Watrous showed that computation with polynomially many CTC bits is equivalent in power to PSPACE. On ... more >>>

We classify two-qubit commuting Hamiltonians in terms of their computational complexity. Suppose one has a two-qubit commuting Hamiltonian $H$ which one can apply to any pair of qubits, starting in a computational basis state. We prove a dichotomy theorem: either this model is efficiently classically simulable or it allows one ... more >>>

We ask, and answer, the question of what's computable by Turing machines equipped with time travel into the past: that is, closed timelike curves or CTCs (with no bound on their size). We focus on a model for CTCs due to Deutsch, which imposes a probabilistic consistency condition to avoid ... more >>>

We introduce the problem of *shadow tomography*: given an unknown $D$-dimensional quantum mixed state $\rho$, as well as known two-outcome measurements $E_{1},\ldots,E_{M}$, estimate the probability that $E_{i}$ accepts $\rho$, to within additive error $\varepsilon$, for each of the $M$ measurements. How many copies of $\rho$ are needed to achieve this, ... more >>>

We study a natural complexity measure of Boolean functions known as the (exact) rational degree. For total functions $f$, it is conjectured that $\mathrm{rdeg}(f)$ is polynomially related to $\mathrm{deg}(f)$, where $\mathrm{deg}(f)$ is the Fourier degree. Towards this conjecture, we show that symmetric functions have rational degree at least $\mathrm{deg}(f)/2$ and ... more >>>

Randomness extractors provide a generic way of converting sources of randomness that are
merely unpredictable into almost uniformly random bits. While in general, deterministic randomness
extraction is impossible, it is possible if the source has some structural constraints.
While much of the literature on deterministic extraction has focused on sources ... more >>>