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arXiv:1906.04583 · Journal of Physics A Mathematical and Theoretical

On the explicit constructions of certain unitary t -designs

Eiichi Bannai, Mikio Nakahara, Zhao Da, Yan Zhu

Published Oct 22, 2019• 12 citations
arXivHTMLPDF

Abstract

Abstract Unitary t -designs are ‘good’ finite subsets of the unitary group that approximate the whole unitary group well. Unitary t -designs have been applied in randomized benchmarking, tomography, quantum cryptography and many other areas of quantum information science. If a unitary t -design itself is a group then it is called a unitary t -group. Although it is known that unitary t -designs in exist for any t and d , the unitary t -groups do not exist for if , as it is shown by Guralnick–Tiep (Guralnick and Tiep 2005 Represent. Theory 9 138–208) and Bannai–Navarro–Rizo–Tiep (Bannai et al 2018 J. Math. Soc. Japan (accepted) ). Explicit constructions of exact unitary t -designs in are not easy in general. In particular, explicit constructions of unitary 4-designs in have been an open problem in quantum information theory. We prove that some exact unitary -designs in the unitary group are constructed from unitary t -groups in that satisfy certain specific conditions. Based on this result, we specifically construct exact unitary 3-designs in from the unitary 2-group in and also unitary 4-designs in from the unitary 3-group in numerically. We also discuss some related problems and a few applications to physics problems.

DOI
10.1088/1751-8121/ab5009

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Abstract Unitary t -designs are ‘good’ finite subsets of the unitary group that approximate the whole unitary group well. Unitary t -designs have been applied in randomized benchmarking, tomography, quantum cryptography and many other areas of quantum information science. If a unitary t -design itself is a group then it is called a unitary t -group. Although it is known that unitary t -designs in exist for any t and d , the unitary t -groups do not exist for if , as it is shown by Guralnick–Tiep (Guralnick and Tiep 2005 Represent. Theory 9 138–208) and Bannai–Navarro–Rizo–Tiep (Bannai et al 2018 J. Math. Soc. Japan (accepted) ). Explicit constructions of exact unitary t -designs in are not easy in general. In particular, explicit constructions of unitary 4-designs in have been an open problem in quantum information theory. We prove that some exact unitary -designs in the unitary group are constructed from unitary t -groups in that satisfy certain specific conditions. Based on this result, we specifically construct exact unitary 3-designs in from the unitary 2-group in and also unitary 4-designs in from the unitary 3-group in numerically. We also discuss some related problems and a few applications to physics problems.
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.
Unitary designs are essential tools in several quantum information protocols. Similarly to other design concepts, unitary designs are mainly used to facilitate averaging over a relevant space, in this case, the unitary group U ( d ) . While it is known that exact unitary t -designs exist for any degree t and dimension d , the most appealing type of designs, group designs (in which the elements of the design form a group), can provide at most 3 -designs. Moreover, even group 2 -designs can exist only in limited dimensions. In this paper, we present novel construction methods for creating exact generalized group designs based on the representation theory of the unitary group and its finite subgroups that overcome the 4 -design-barrier of unitary group designs. Furthermore, a construction is presented for creating generalized group 2 -designs in arbitrary dimensions.
We consider an extension of the concept of spherical t-designs to the unitary group in order to develop a unified framework for analyzing the resource requirements of randomized quantum algorithms. We show that certain protocols based on twirling require a unitary 2-design. We describe an efficient construction for an exact unitary 2-design based on the Clifford group, and then develop a method for generating an epsilon-approximate unitary 2-design that requires only O(n log(1/epsilon)) gates, where n is the number of qubits and epsilon is an appropriate measure of precision. These results lead to a protocol with exponential resource savings over existing experimental methods for estimating the characteristic fidelities of physical quantum processes.
A unitary t-design is a powerful tool in quantum information science and fundamental physics.Despite its usefulness, only approximate implementations were known for general t.In this paper, we provide quantum circuits that generate exact unitary t-designs for any t on an arbitrary number of qubits.Our construction is inductive and is of practical use in small systems.We then introduce a tth-order generalization of randomized benchmarking (t-RB) as an application of exact 2t-designs.We particularly study the 2-RB in detail and show that it reveals self-adjointness of quantum noise, a metric related to the feasibility of quantum error correction (QEC).We numerically demonstrate that the 2-RB in one-and two-qubit systems is feasible, and experimentally characterize background noise of a superconducting qubit by the 2-RB.It is shown from the experiment that interactions with adjacent qubits induce the noise that may result in an obstacle toward a realization of QEC.
Characterising the efficiency with which designs over various subsets of the unitary group may be constructed is an important goal of quantum information theory. While it is now known that approximate unitary designs can be realised in depth logarithmic in the system size, it has recently been shown that ensembles of local nearest-neighbour sublinear-depth one-dimensional circuits over the matchgate, orthogonal, and symplectic groups cannot form approximate 2-designs over their parent groups; similarly, sublinear-depth ensembles of Cliffords cannot form a Clifford 4-design. In this note we show that this remarkable exponential separation is not merely an artefact of restricting to ensembles consisting of unitaries from the subgroups themselves, but rather that no ensemble of local nearest-neighbour sublinear-depth unitaries can realise approximate designs in the aforementioned cases, even when employing "ambient" unitaries from beyond the subgroup itself (possibly acting on ancilla qubits). This implies that various natural tomography and benchmarking schemes which involves sampling from these groups suffer from a dramatic circuit depth overhead compared to similar protocols which involve sampling from the full unitary group. We additionally conclude that, in all of the above cases, the known linear-depth design constructions are up to constant factors optimal.
Unitary t -designs are the bread and butter of quantum information theory and beyond. An important issue in practice is that of efficiently constructing good approximations of such unitary t -designs. Building on results by Aubrun (Comm. Math. Phys. 2009), we prove that sampling dtpoly(t,log⁡d,1/ϵ) unitaries from an exact t -design provides with positive probability an ϵ -approximate t -design, if the error is measured in one-to-one norm. As an application, we give a randomized construction of a quantum encryption scheme that has roughly the same key size and security as the quantum one-time pad, but possesses the additional property of being non-malleable against adversaries without quantum side information.