Quantum search by measurement

Abstract

We propose a quantum algorithm for solving combinatorial search problems that uses only a sequence of measurements. The algorithm is similar in spirit to quantum computation by adiabatic evolution, in that the goal is to remain in the ground state of a time-varying Hamiltonian. Indeed, we show that the running times of the two algorithms are closely related. We also show how to achieve the quadratic speedup for Grover's unstructured search problem with only two measurements. Finally, we discuss some similarities and differences between the adiabatic and measurement algorithms.