A classical oracle separation between QMA and QMA(2)

arXiv:2610.06760 · quant-ph · Submitted 2026-10-05 · Read on arXiv

quant-ph

Submitted: 2026-10-05

Updated: 2026-10-05

License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/

The gist: We exhibit a classical oracle relative to which QMA not equal to QMA(2).

Abstract

We exhibit a classical oracle relative to which QMA not equal to QMA(2). The separation is based on a separable Hamiltonian problem defined by signed edge constraints on a graph. The YES instances have zero-energy product states, while the NO instances, constructed using the antisymmetric subspace, have entangled zero-energy states but no low-energy product states. For the QMA lower bound, we use compressed-oracle techniques to track the information learned by a quantum computation making few queries to a YES instance. The key step is to map the resulting superpositions of partial oracle records to the NO family without significantly changing the verifier's behavior.

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