A four-player potential game for barren-plateau-aware quantum ansatz design

We present a novel parameterized 4-qubit Eisert-Wilkens-Lewenstein (EWL) quantum game circuit for recommender systems in quadruple helix innovation ecosystems (academia, industry, government, and civil society). The local strategy operators $U_{i} = R_y(θ_{i})$ for each helix actor are directly tuned by normalized dominance weights extracted from real participant funding data (\texit{ecContribution}) in the European Commission CORDIS Horizon Europe database (project COVend, ID 101045956). The circuit employs a multi-qubit EWL entangler followed by parameterized local rotations, inverse entangler, and full measurement, achieving only 22 gates and circuit depth 11 while scaling as $O(n)$ for $n$-round helix communications. Measurement probabilities after the quantum game serve as recommender scores for disruptive versus sustaining innovation trends. These scores are subsequently mapped into the diagonal Dirac potential of a Dirac-Solow-Swan Hamiltonian, enabling time-evolution simulation of capital accumulation and bifurcation dynamics under disruptive innovation. Numerical experiments on real CORDIS quadruple-helix collaboration networks demonstrate the circuit's NISQ compatibility and its ability to forecast disruptive capital trajectories with high fidelity. The proposed framework bridges quantum game theory, parameterized quantum circuits, and relativistic economic growth models, offering a computationally efficient tool for innovation policy and strategic decision-making in complex socio-economic ecosystems. Complexity analysis and reproducibility are provided through open Qiskit implementations.

Variational quantum circuits have been central to many proposed near-term applications of quantum computing, but a growing body of evidence suggests that trainability and quantum advantage are fundamentally at odds: ansätze expressive enough to resist efficient classical simulation tend to exhibit barren plateaus, while structures that provably rule out barren plateaus typically render them classically simulable. We propose a stacked linear combination of unitaries (S-LCU) as a variational ansatz which provides a tunable trade-off between barren plateaus and classical simulability. Using a diagrammatic analysis, we bound the loss-landscape variance of the Free Fermion S-LCU, whose elements are fermionic Gaussian unitaries. We prove a variance lower bound of $Ω(1/(n k^{3l}))$, with a simulation cost of $O(k^{2l} n^3)$ using the best known classical algorithm, compared to a quantum gate complexity of only $O(lkn^2)$. The number of layers $l$ serves as a single dial that trades computational complexity against the rate of cost concentration. This offers practitioners a systematic method for constructing ansätze with a complexity-trainability trade-off that best suits their application and hardware.

Expressive parameterized quantum circuits (PQCs) are often designed under a dilemma: the growth of expressibility and entangling power (EP) that improves Hilbert-space coverage is also expected to randomize an ansatz and activate barren-plateau (BP) conditions. We show that this dilemma is not a one-dimensional tradeoff. The usual picture collapses three inequivalent objects -- parameter-ensemble coverage, fixed-circuit entangling response, and local gradient moments -- into one scalar narrative. For a fixed circuit probed by Haar-product inputs, EP is a global two-copy mean of the output-entanglement distribution, whereas entangling-power deviation (EPD) is a global four-copy fluctuation descriptor. Gradient variance, however, is a local two-copy contraction selected by a parameter light cone and a cost observable. This moment hierarchy yields an analytic separation: equal EP need not imply equal trainability, as witnessed by equal-EP circuits with different EPDs and different gradient variances. These separations turn EP and EPD into a two-dial design rule for PQC ansatzes: EP measures how far the circuit has moved along the coverage dial, while EPD monitors whether input-dependent variability remains. We find that ansatz routes can reach high, Haar-like coverage before EPD and gradient variance collapse, showing that coverage and BP activation are distinct crossover events. The EP/EPD framework thus breaks the apparent one-dimensional expressibility-trainability tradeoff into a practical design rule: search for highly expressive PQCs in the window where coverage is high but BP-like homogenization has not yet erased trainable structure.