Pseudorandom States, Non-Cloning Theorems and Quantum Money

We propose the concept of pseudorandom states and study their constructions, properties, and applications. Under the assumption that quantum-secure one-way functions exist, we present concrete and efficient constructions of pseudorandom states. The non-cloning theorem plays a central role in our study—it motivates the proper definition and characterizes one of the important properties of pseudorandom quantum states. Namely, there is no efficient quantum algorithm that can create more copies of the state from a given number of pseudorandom states. As the main application, we prove that any family of pseudorandom states naturally gives rise to a private-key quantum money scheme.