Structural Conditions for Distributed Quantum Advantage
Abstract
Circuit cutting runs a quantum computation on processors smaller than the circuit, at the price of classical knitting whose cost grows exponentially with the number of cut gates. Keeping this cost affordable is necessary but not sufficient for an advantage, since knitting classically easy subcircuits is itself classically easy. We formulate three requirements for distributed quantum advantage under a stated budget: affordable knitting, classical difficulty that survives the cut, and, for variational circuits, resolvable gradients. We prove that under stated assumptions knitting stays affordable when subcircuits grow behind a bounded interface and becomes exponentially expensive when fixed-width subcircuits multiply. We turn the requirements into screening criteria and apply them to eighteen circuit families. We identify finite local-depth circuits with bounded interfaces as a setting in which the requirements can coexist, with hardness established only in the worst case. As a classically verifiable proof of principle, we knit one gate joining two field-perturbed toric-code patches on an IBM Nighthawk processor for up to 142 spins, and confirm that the reconstruction can at least resolve the contact correlation beyond independent execution for up to 98 qubits.
Related
- Quantum Advantage for Distributed Symmetry Breaking
- Taking Advantage of Noise in Distributed Random Quantum Circuits
- Distributed fiber optical multiparameter sensor combining three backscattering effects for structural health monitoring
- Exponential advantage in continuous-variable quantum state learning
- Quantum metrological advantage of high-order squeezed states
BibTeX
@misc{dragoi2026structural,
title = {{Structural Conditions for Distributed Quantum Advantage}},
author = {Sabina Drăgoi and María Gragera Garcés and Lirandë Pira},
howpublished = {arXiv},
year = {2026},
month = oct,
doi = {10.48550/arxiv.2610.04393},
eprint = {2610.04393},
archivePrefix = {arXiv},
url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.04393},
note = {CC BY 4.0},
}
RIS
TY - UNPB
TI - Structural Conditions for Distributed Quantum Advantage
AU - Sabina Drăgoi
AU - María Gragera Garcés
AU - Lirandë Pira
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/10/03
PB - arXiv
DO - 10.48550/arxiv.2610.04393
UR - https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.04393
AB - Circuit cutting runs a quantum computation on processors smaller than the circuit, at the price of classical knitting whose cost grows exponentially with the number of cut gates. Keeping this cost affordable is necessary but not sufficient for an advantage, since knitting classically easy subcircuits is itself classically easy. We formulate three requirements for distributed quantum advantage under a stated budget: affordable knitting, classical difficulty that survives the cut, and, for variational circuits, resolvable gradients. We prove that under stated assumptions knitting stays affordable when subcircuits grow behind a bounded interface and becomes exponentially expensive when fixed-width subcircuits multiply. We turn the requirements into screening criteria and apply them to eighteen circuit families. We identify finite local-depth circuits with bounded interfaces as a setting in which the requirements can coexist, with hardness established only in the worst case. As a classically verifiable proof of principle, we knit one gate joining two field-perturbed toric-code patches on an IBM Nighthawk processor for up to 142 spins, and confirm that the reconstruction can at least resolve the contact correlation beyond independent execution for up to 98 qubits.
ER -