Space-Efficient Error Reduction for Unitary Quantum Computations

This paper develops general space-efficient methods for error reduction for unitary quantum computation. Consider a polynomial-time quantum computation with completeness $c$ and soundness $s$, either with or without a witness (corresponding to QMA and BQP, respectively). To convert this computation into a new computation with error at most $2^{-p}$, the most space-efficient method known requires extra workspace of ${O \bigl( p \log \frac{1}{c-s} \bigr)}$ qubits. This space requirement is too large for scenarios like logarithmic-space quantum computations. This paper presents error-reduction methods for unitary quantum computations (i.e., computations without intermediate measurements) that require extra workspace of just ${O \bigl( \log \frac{p}{c-s} \bigr)}$ qubits. This in particular gives the first methods of strong amplification for logarithmic-space unitary quantum computations with two-sided bounded error. This also leads to a number of consequences in complexity theory, such as the uselessness of quantum witnesses in bounded-error logarithmic-space unitary quantum computations, the PSPACE upper bound for QMA with exponentially-small completeness-soundness gap, and strong amplification for matchgate computations.