Achieving double-logarithmic precision dependence in optimization-based quantum unstructured search

Grover’s algorithm is a fundamental quantum algorithm that achieves a quadratic speedup for unstructured search problems of size $N$. Recent studies have reformulated this task as a maximization problem on the unitary manifold and solved it via linearly convergent Riemannian gradient ascent (RGA) methods, resulting in a complexity of $O(\sqrt{N}\log (1/\varepsilon))$. In this work, we adopt the Riemannian modified Newton (RMN) method to solve the quantum search problem. We show that, in the setting of quantum search, the Riemannian Newton direction is collinear with the Riemannian gradient in the sense that the Riemannian gradient is always an eigenvector of the corresponding Riemannian Hessian. As a result, without additional overhead, the proposed RMN method numerically achieves a quadratic convergence rate with respect to error $\varepsilon$, implying a complexity of $O(\sqrt{N}\log\log (1/\varepsilon))$, which is double-logarithmic in precision. Furthermore, our approach remains Grover-compatible, namely, it relies exclusively on the standard Grover oracle and diffusion operators to ensure algorithmic implementability, and its parameter update process can be efficiently precomputed on classical computers.

💡 Research Summary

The paper revisits the unstructured search problem, traditionally solved by Grover’s algorithm with a query complexity of Θ(√N), and reformulates it as a maximization problem on the unitary group U(N). The objective function f(U)=Tr