  We study the quantum complexity of the static set membership problem: given a
subset S (|S| \leq n) of a universe of size m (m \gg n), store it as a table of
bits so that queries of the form `Is x \in S?' can be answered. The goal is to
use a small table and yet answer queries using few bitprobes. This problem was
considered recently by Buhrman, Miltersen, Radhakrishnan and Venkatesh, where
lower and upper bounds were shown for this problem in the classical
deterministic and randomized models. In this paper, we formulate this problem
in the "quantum bitprobe model" and show tradeoff results between space and
time.In this model, the storage scheme is classical but the query scheme is
quantum.We show, roughly speaking, that similar lower bounds hold in the
quantum model as in the classical model, which imply that the classical upper
bounds are more or less tight even in the quantum case. Our lower bounds are
proved using linear algebraic techniques.
