An efficient high dimensional quantum Schur transform

Abstract

The Schur transform is a unitary operator that block diagonalizes the action of the symmetric and unitary groups on an n fold tensor product V n of a vector space V of dimension d. Bacon, Chuang and Harrow [5] gave a quantum algorithm for this transform that is polynomial in n, d and log ϵ-1, where ϵ is the precision. In a footnote in Harrow's thesis [18], a brief description of how to make the algorithm of [5] polynomial in log d is given using the unitary group representation theory (however, this has not been explained in detail anywhere1). In this article, we present a quantum algorithm for the Schur transform that is polynomial in n, log d and log ϵ-1 using a different approach. Specifically, we build this transform using the representation theory of the symmetric group and in this sense our technique can be considered a \dual" algorithm to [5]. A novel feature of our algorithm is that we construct the quantum Fourier transform over the so called permutation modules, which could have other applications.