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arXiv:1609.08172

The Clifford group fails gracefully to be a unitary 4-design

Huangjun Zhu, Richard Kueng, Markus Grassl, Gross, David

Published Sep 26, 2016• 46 citations

Abstract

A unitary t-design is a set of unitaries that is "evenly distributed" in the sense that the average of any t-th order polynomial over the design equals the average over the entire unitary group. In various fields -- e.g. quantum information theory -- one frequently encounters constructions that rely on matrices drawn uniformly at random from the unitary group. Often, it suffices to sample these matrices from a unitary t-design, for sufficiently high t. This results in more explicit, derandomized constructions. The most prominent unitary t-design considered in quantum information is the multi-qubit Clifford group. It is known to be a unitary 3-design, but, unfortunately, not a 4-design. Here, we give a simple, explicit characterization of the way in which the Clifford group fails to constitute a 4-design. Our results show that for various applications in quantum information theory and in the theory of convex signal recovery, Clifford orbits perform almost as well as those of true 4-designs. Technically, it turns out that in a precise sense, the 4th tensor power of the Clifford group affords only one more invariant subspace than the 4th tensor power of the unitary group. That additional subspace is a stabilizer code -- a structure extensively studied in the field of quantum error correction codes. The action of the Clifford group on this stabilizer code can be decomposed explicitly into previously known irreps of the discrete symplectic group. We give various constructions of exact complex projective 4-designs or approximate 4-designs of arbitrarily high precision from Clifford orbits. Building on results from coding theory, we give strong evidence suggesting that these orbits actually constitute complex projective 5-designs.

DOI: 10.48550/arxiv.1609.08172

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A unitary t-design is a set of unitaries that is "evenly distributed" in the sense that the average of any t-th order polynomial over the design equals the average over the entire unitary group. In various fields -- e.g. quantum information theory -- one frequently encounters constructions that rely on matrices drawn uniformly at random from the unitary group. Often, it suffices to sample these matrices from a unitary t-design, for sufficiently high t. This results in more explicit, derandomized constructions. The most prominent unitary t-design considered in quantum information is the multi-qubit Clifford group. It is known to be a unitary 3-design, but, unfortunately, not a 4-design. Here, we give a simple, explicit characterization of the way in which the Clifford group fails to constitute a 4-design. Our results show that for various applications in quantum information theory and in the theory of convex signal recovery, Clifford orbits perform almost as well as those of true 4-designs. Technically, it turns out that in a precise sense, the 4th tensor power of the Clifford group affords only one more invariant subspace than the 4th tensor power of the unitary group. That additional subspace is a stabilizer code -- a structure extensively studied in the field of quantum error correction codes. The action of the Clifford group on this stabilizer code can be decomposed explicitly into previously known irreps of the discrete symplectic group. We give various constructions of exact complex projective 4-designs or approximate 4-designs of arbitrarily high precision from Clifford orbits. Building on results from coding theory, we give strong evidence suggesting that these orbits actually constitute complex projective 5-designs.

Unitary

t

-designs are a ubiquitous tool in many research areas, including randomized benchmarking, quantum process tomography, and scrambling. Despite the intensive efforts of many researchers, little is known about unitary

t

-designs with $t\ensuremath{\ge}3$ in the literature. We show that the multiqubit Clifford group in any even prime-power dimension is not only a unitary 2-design, but also a 3-design. Moreover, it is a minimal 3-design except for dimension 4. As an immediate consequence, any orbit of pure states of the multiqubit Clifford group forms a complex projective 3-design; in particular, the set of stabilizer states forms a 3-design. In addition, our study is helpful in studying higher moments of the Clifford group, which are useful in many research areas ranging from quantum information science to signal processing. Furthermore, we reveal a surprising connection between unitary 3-designs and the physics of discrete phase spaces and thereby offer a simple explanation of why no discrete Wigner function is covariant with respect to the multiqubit Clifford group, which is of intrinsic interest in studying quantum computation.

A complex projective

t

-design is a configuration of vectors which is ``evenly distributed'' on a sphere in the sense that sampling uniformly from it reproduces the moments of Haar measure up to order

2t

. We show that the set of all

n

-qubit stabilizer states forms a complex projective

3

-design in dimension

2^n

. Stabilizer states had previously only been known to constitute

2

-designs. The main technical ingredient is a general recursion formula for the so-called frame potential of stabilizer states. To establish it, we need to compute the number of stabilizer states with pre-described inner product with respect to a reference state. This, in turn, reduces to a counting problem in discrete symplectic vector spaces for which we find a simple formula. We sketch applications in quantum information and signal analysis.

Unitary k-designs are finite ensembles of unitary matrices that approximate the Haar distribution over unitary matrices. Several ensembles are known to be 2-designs, including the uniform distribution over the Clifford group, but no family of ensembles was previously known to form a 3-design. We prove that the Clifford group is a 3-design, showing that it is a better approximation to Haar-random unitaries than previously expected. Our proof strategy works for any distribution of unitaries satisfying a property we call Pauli 2-mixing and proceeds without the use of heavy mathematical machinery. We also show that the Clifford group does not form a 4-design, thus characterizing how well random Clifford elements approximate Haar-random unitaries. Additionally, we show that the generalized Clifford group for qudits is not a 3-design unless the dimension of the qudit is a power of 2.

Unitary t-designs are some of the most versatile tools in quantum information theory. Their applications range from randomized benchmarking and shadow tomography, to more fundamental ones such as emulating quantum chaos and establishing exponential separations between classical and quantum query complexity. While unitary designs originating from a group structure, such as the Clifford group, have proven to be incredibly useful for qubit systems, unfortunately, this is no longer true for qudits. In fact, the classification of finite-group representations rules out the existence of unitary 2-designs for arbitrary qudit dimensions. This severely limits the applicability of standard quantum information primitives when it comes to qudit systems. We overcome these limitations with a three-fold contribution. First, we introduce a general technique to construct families of weighted state t-designs in arbitrary qudit dimensions. These weighted state-designs generalize classical shadow tomography protocol from qubits to qudits. Second, we introduce a Clifford character RB that allows us to benchmark the qudit Clifford group in any dimension, including non-prime-power dimensions. And third, we establish bounds on the quantum circuit complexity of generating approximate unitary-designs from native gates in existing quantum hardware such as high-spin and cavity-QED qudits. Our work further highlights the analogy between spin and optical coherent states by proving that spin-GKP codewords form a state 2-design while spin coherent states do not; in direct analogy with the optical case. This work is structured as a pedagogical and self-contained introduction to unitary designs and their applications to qudit systems.

We clarify the mathematical structure underlying unitary t-designs. These are sets of unitary matrices, evenly distributed in the sense that the average of any tth order polynomial over the design equals the average over the entire unitary group. We present a simple necessary and sufficient criterion for deciding if a set of matrices constitutes a design. Lower bounds for the number of elements of 2-designs are derived. We show how to turn mutually unbiased bases into approximate 2-designs whose cardinality is optimal in leading order. Designs of higher order are discussed and an example of a unitary 5-design is presented. We comment on the relation between unitary and spherical designs and outline methods for finding designs numerically or by searching character tables of finite groups. Further, we sketch connections to problems in linear optics and questions regarding typical entanglement.

Abstract Many quantum information protocols require the implementation of random unitaries. Because it takes exponential resources to produce Haar-random unitaries drawn from the full n -qubit group, one often resorts to t -designs. Unitary t -designs mimic the Haar-measure up to t -th moments. It is known that Clifford operations can implement at most 3-designs. In this work, we quantify the non-Clifford resources required to break this barrier. We find that it suffices to inject

O(t^{4}\log ^{2}(t)\log (1/\varepsilon ))

O ( t 4 log 2 ( t ) log ( 1 / ε ) ) many non-Clifford gates into a polynomial-depth random Clifford circuit to obtain an

\varepsilon

ε -approximate t -design. Strikingly, the number of non-Clifford gates required is independent of the system size – asymptotically, the density of non-Clifford gates is allowed to tend to zero. We also derive novel bounds on the convergence time of random Clifford circuits to the t -th moment of the uniform distribution on the Clifford group. Our proofs exploit a recently developed variant of Schur-Weyl duality for the Clifford group, as well as bounds on restricted spectral gaps of averaging operators.