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arXiv:2110.02965 · Physical Review Research

Classical shadows for quantum process tomography on near-term quantum computers

Ryan Levy, Di Luo, Bryan K. Clark

Published Jan 10, 2024• 58 citations
arXivHTMLPDF

Abstract

Quantum process tomography is a powerful tool for understanding quantum channels and characterizing the properties of quantum devices. Inspired by recent advances using classical shadows in quantum state tomography [H.-Y. Huang, R. Kueng, and J. Preskill, .], we have developed ShadowQPT, a classical shadow method for quantum process tomography. We introduce two related formulations with and without ancilla qubits. ShadowQPT stochastically reconstructs the Choi matrix of the device allowing for an classical evaluation of the device on arbitrary inputs with respect to arbitrary outputs. Using shadows, we then show how to compute overlaps, generate all k -weight reduced processes, and perform reconstruction via Hamiltonian learning. These latter two tasks are efficient for large systems as the number of quantum measurements needed scales only logarithmically with the number of qubits. A number of additional approximations and improvements are developed, including the use of a pair-factorized Clifford shadow and a series of postprocessing techniques that significantly enhance the accuracy for recovering the quantum channel. We have implemented ShadowQPT using both Pauli and Clifford measurements on the IonQ trapped ion quantum computer for quantum processes up to n=4 qubits, and we achieved good performance. Published by the American Physical Society 2024

DOI
10.1103/physrevresearch.6.013029

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Quantum process tomography is a powerful tool for understanding quantum channels and characterizing the properties of quantum devices. Inspired by recent advances using classical shadows in quantum state tomography [H.-Y. Huang, R. Kueng, and J. Preskill, .], we have developed ShadowQPT, a classical shadow method for quantum process tomography. We introduce two related formulations with and without ancilla qubits. ShadowQPT stochastically reconstructs the Choi matrix of the device allowing for an classical evaluation of the device on arbitrary inputs with respect to arbitrary outputs. Using shadows, we then show how to compute overlaps, generate all k -weight reduced processes, and perform reconstruction via Hamiltonian learning. These latter two tasks are efficient for large systems as the number of quantum measurements needed scales only logarithmically with the number of qubits. A number of additional approximations and improvements are developed, including the use of a pair-factorized Clifford shadow and a series of postprocessing techniques that significantly enhance the accuracy for recovering the quantum channel. We have implemented ShadowQPT using both Pauli and Clifford measurements on the IonQ trapped ion quantum computer for quantum processes up to n=4 qubits, and we achieved good performance. Published by the American Physical Society 2024
Quantum process tomography is a critical capability for building quantum computers, enabling quantum networks, and understanding quantum sensors. Like quantum state tomography, the process tomography of an arbitrary quantum channel requires a number of measurements that scales exponentially in the number of quantum bits affected. However, the recent field of shadow tomography, applied to quantum states, has demonstrated the ability to extract key information about a state with only polynomially many measurements. In this work, we apply the concepts of shadow state tomography to the challenge of characterizing quantum processes. We make use of the Choi isomorphism to directly apply rigorous bounds from shadow state tomography to shadow process tomography, and we find additional bounds on the number of measurements that are unique to process tomography. Our results, which include algorithms for implementing shadow process tomography, enable new techniques including evaluation of channel concatenation and the application of channels to shadows of quantum states. This provides a dramatic improvement for understanding large-scale quantum systems.
Quantum process tomography (QPT) is crucial for advancing quantum technologies, including quantum computers, quantum networks and quantum sensors. Shadow process tomography (SPT) utilizes the Choi isomorphism to map QPT to shadow state tomography (SST), significantly reducing the sample complexity for extracting information from quantum processes. However, SPT relies on random unitary operators and complicates the determination of the optimal unitary operator that minimizes the shadow norm, which is the key factor influencing the sample complexity. In this work, we propose a generalized SPT framework that minimizes the shadow norm by replacing unitary operators with generalized measurements (POVMs). This approach, termed shadow process tomography with POVMs (POVM-SPT), uses convex optimization to identify the optimal POVM for minimizing the shadow norm, thereby further reducing sample complexity. We demonstrate the identification of the optimal POVM through numerical simulations and provide the corresponding optimization algorithms. Our numerical experiments demonstrate that POVM-SPT achieves a substantial reduction in shadow norm compared to conventional SPT, with an approximate 7-fold improvement for single-qubit input states and a remarkable 21802^{180}2180-fold enhancement for 64-qubit input states. These results reveal that POVM-SPT offers significant advantages in simplifying SPT tasks, particularly for large-scale quantum systems.
Quantum state tomography is a fundamental technique for characterizing quantum systems, but its scalability remains a significant challenge. This paper investigates an efficient alternative using classical shadows to reconstruct a Bell state with high fidelity. Classical shadows provide a compressed representation of a quantum state using randomized measurements, reducing the measurement complexity compared to full quantum tomography when full state reconstruction is not required. We employed a quantum circuit to generate a Bell state and utilize 1000 snapshots to construct its classical shadow. The reconstructed density matrix is evaluated using fidelity and norm difference metrics against the ideal Bell state. Our analysis demonstrates that as the number of snapshots increases, the fidelity of reconstruction stabilizes around 0.98-1.0, with the norm difference decreasing accordingly. The results also confirm the convergence of reconstructed states towards the ideal Bell state, highlighting the efficiency and accuracy of classical shadows in quantum state estimation. Shallow shadow tomography uses shallow random circuits to estimate global quantum state properties on noisy hardware. By combining low-depth entangling gates with randomized measurements and noise-aware postprocessing, it reduces sample complexity compared to Pauli shadows while remaining experimentally feasible. Recent experiments on superconducting processors confirmed up to fivefold measurement savings.
Learning dynamics from repeated observation of the time evolution of an open quantum system, namely, the problem of quantum process tomography is an important task. This task is difficult in general, but, with some additional constraints could be tractable. This motivates us to look at the problem of Lindblad operator discovery from observations. We point out that for moderate size Hilbert spaces, low Kraus rank of the channel, and short time steps, the eigenvalues of the Choi matrix corresponding to the channel have a special structure. We use the least-square method for the estimation of a channel where, for fixed inputs, we estimate the outputs by classical shadows. The resultant noisy estimate of the channel can then be denoised by diagonalizing the nominal Choi matrix, truncating some eigenvalues, and altering it to a genuine Choi matrix. This processed Choi matrix is then compared to the original one. We see that as the number of samples increases, our reconstruction becomes more accurate. We also use tools from random matrix theory to understand the effect of estimation noise in the eigenspectrum of the estimated Choi matrix.
Shadow tomography has appeared as a powerful tool for estimating observables on quantum computers from a small number of samples. We show that shadow-tomography-inspired ideas can offer similarly improved sample scaling for estimating observables on tensor network states on classical computers after proper adaptation. We develop strategies for both spin (bosonic) and fermionic systems, tailored to the contraction requirements of tensor networks, and generate scaling improvements of factors of O(N)O(N)O(N) to O(N3)O(N^{3})O(N3) (where NNN is system size), depending on the specific task and system type. For the important and difficult task of evaluating the expectation value of long-range interacting Hamiltonians, we achieve the optimal O(1)O(1)O(1) overall scaling (up to logarithmic factors) for an arbitrarily fixed relative Monte Carlo error in both spin and fermionic systems. Additionally, we show that shadow estimators offer more stable gradients of observables in variational optimization tasks than standard Monte Carlo estimators. We demonstrate practical advantage by simulating systems with long-range interactions, including the 2D long-range Heisenberg model and an ab-initio quantum chemistry Hamiltonian.
In quantum information theory, the accurate estimation of observables is pivotal for quantum information processing, playing a crucial role in computational and communication protocols. This work introduces a technique for estimating such objects, leveraging an underutilized resource in the inversion map of classical shadows that greatly refines the estimation cost of target observables without incurring any additional overhead. A generalized framework for computing and optimizing additional degrees of freedom in the homogeneous space of the shadow inversion is given that may be adapted to a variety of near-term problems. In the special case of local measurement strategies, we show feasible optimization leading to an exponential separation in sample complexity versus the standard approach and, in an exceptional case, we give nontrivial examples of optimized postprocessing for local measurements, achieving the same efficiency as the global Cliffords shadows. Published by the American Physical Society 2024