title: Interacting boson problems can be QMA hard.
abstract: Computing the ground-state energy of interacting electron problems has recently been shown to be hard for quantum Merlin Arthur (QMA), a quantum analogue of the complexity class NP. Fermionic problems are usually hard, a phenomenon widely attributed to the so-called sign problem. The corresponding bosonic problems are, according to conventional wisdom, tractable. Here, we demonstrate that the complexity of interacting boson problems is also QMA hard. Moreover, the bosonic version of N-representability problem is QMA complete. Consequently, these problems are unlikely to have efficient quantum algorithms.
authors.affiliation: Institute for Quantum Computing, University of Waterloo, Waterloo, Ontario, Canada.
authors.forename: Tzu-Chieh
authors.initials: TC
authors.lastname: Wei
authors.forename: Michele
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Mosca
authors.forename: Ashwin
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Nayak