Derivatives of Quantum Randomness: Separating Pseudorandom Unitaries from Pseudorandom (Function-like) States

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2609.14626v1
• Date: Sun, 13 Sep 2026 15:54:16 GMT
• Title: Derivatives of Quantum Randomness: Separating Pseudorandom Unitaries from Pseudorandom (Function-like) States
• Abstract summary: We show a full unitary oracle separation between PRFSGs and PRUs.<n>This reveals a fundamental distinction between pseudorandomness for quantum states and for quantum unitaries.
• Score: 3.891921282474929
• License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
• Abstract: Quantum computation gives rise to new pseudorandom primitives for states and unitaries, including pseudorandom state generators (PRSGs), pseudorandom function-like state generators (PRFSGs), and pseudorandom unitaries (PRUs). In this paper, we show a full unitary oracle separation between PRFSGs and PRUs. The separation holds between the strongest state notion and the weakest unitary notion: even adaptively secure, quantum-accessible PRFSGs do not imply non-adaptively secure, forward-only PRUs, even when their implementations are allowed to be non-unitary and use an arbitrary number of ancillary qubits. This reveals a fundamental distinction between pseudorandomness for quantum states and for quantum unitaries. Our main technical idea is to view a candidate PRU construction with access to state generation oracles as a map from the underlying oracle states to implemented unitaries, and to study the derivatives of this map. These derivatives are inherently low rank, and we exploit this low-rank structure to distinguish the resulting unitaries from truly random ones. We believe this differential perspective may be useful for studying other structural questions about quantum states and unitaries.

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