Symmetry-assisted adversaries for quantum state generation

We introduce a new quantum adversary method to prove lower bounds on the query complexity of the quantum state generation problem. This problem encompasses both, the computation of partial or total functions and the preparation of target quantum states. There has been hope for quite some time that quantum state generation might be a route to tackle the $backslash$sc Graph Isomorphism problem. We show that for the related problem of $backslash$sc Index Erasure our method leads to a lower bound of $backslash Omega(backslash sqrt N)$ which matches an upper bound obtained via reduction to quantum search on $N$ elements. This closes an open problem first raised by Shi [FOCS'02]. Our approach is …