QUROPE Quantum Information Processing and Communication in Europe

We propose a scheme for translating metrological precision bounds into lower bounds on query complexity of quantum search algorithms. Within the scheme the link between quadratic performance enhancement in idealized quantum metrological and quantum computing schemes becomes clear. More importantly, we utilize results from the field of quantum metrology on a generic loss of quadratic quantum precision enhancement in the presence of decoherence to infer an analogous generic loss of quadratic speedup in oracle based quantum computing. While most of our reasoning is rigorous, at one of the final steps, we need to make use of an unproven technical conjecture. We hope that we will be able to amend this deficiency in the near future, but we are convinced that even without the conjecture proven our results provide a deep insight into the relationship between quantum algorithms and quantum metrology protocols.