Geometric Strategy for the Optimal Quantum Search

Abstract

We explore quantum search from the geometric viewpoint of a complex projective space $CP$, a space of rays. First, we show that the optimal quantum search can be geometrically identified with the shortest path along the geodesic joining a target state, an element of the computational basis, and such an initial state as overlaps equally, up to phases, with all the elements of the computational basis. Second, we calculate the entanglement through the algorithm for any number of qubits $n$ as the minimum Fubini-Study distance to the submanifold formed by separable states in Segre embedding, and find that entanglement is used almost maximally for large $n$. The computational time seems to be optimized by the dynamics as the geodesic, running across entangled states away from the submanifold of separable states, rather than the amount of entanglement itself.