Solution

ID: past-exam-of-the-mathematics-course-of-the-university-of-cambridge/2016/iii/paper-324/2/a/solution

Take to be normalized and let be the orthogonal projection onto the good subspace. The two reflection operators are
The first fixes the hyperplane orthogonal to and negates its normal direction. The second fixes and negates . Both are Hermitian operators and unitary operators, since their defining projectors square to themselves. For a non-normalized nonzero vector, divide by .
Put , with , and define normalized orthogonal good and bad vectors
Then . The amplitude amplification theorem states that the iterate satisfies, for every nonnegative integer ,
To prove it, the span of is invariant under both reflection operators. In that ordered orthonormal basis,
Multiplying the second matrix into advances the angle by . Induction proves the formula, and projecting onto gives . The minus sign in is just a global phase choice, but it makes the displayed state formula exact.
If is known, choose nearest to , with . The final angle is within of , so . For , this is at least after iterations, and is close to one when is small. For , measuring the initial state already has success above . Repeated independent attempts with a success test give any fixed desired success probability. This is the quadratic improvement of amplitude amplification over repeated sampling, which takes attempts. At there is no good component to amplify, and at the initial state is already entirely good; these endpoint cases do not require the undefined normalized component vectors.

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