We introduce a postprocessing technique for classical shadow measurement data that enhances the precision of ground state estimation through high-dimensional subspace expansion; the dimensionality is only limited by the amount of classical postprocessing resources rather than by quantum resources. Crucial steps of our approach are the efficient identification of useful observables from shadow data, followed by our regularized subspace expansion that is designed to be numerically stable even when using noisy data. We analytically investigate noise propagation within our method, and upper bound the statistical fluctuations due to the limited number of snapshots in classical shadows. In numerical simulations, our method can achieve a reduction in the energy estimation errors in many cases, sometimes by more than an order of magnitude. We also demonstrate that our performance improvements are robust against both coherent errors (bad initial state) and gate noise in the state-preparation circuits. Furthermore, performance is guaranteed to be at least as good—and in many cases better—than direct energy estimation without using additional quantum resources, and the approach is thus a very natural alternative for estimating ground state energies directly from classical shadow data.
We introduce a postprocessing technique for classical shadow measurement data that enhances the precision of ground state estimation through high-dimensional subspace expansion; the dimensionality is only limited by the amount of classical postprocessing resources rather than by quantum resources. Crucial steps of our approach are the efficient identification of useful observables from shadow data, followed by our regularized subspace expansion that is designed to be numerically stable even when using noisy data. We analytically investigate noise propagation within our method, and upper bound the statistical fluctuations due to the limited number of snapshots in classical shadows. In numerical simulations, our method can achieve a reduction in the energy estimation errors in many cases, sometimes by more than an order of magnitude. We also demonstrate that our performance improvements are robust against both coherent errors (bad initial state) and gate noise in the state-preparation circuits. Furthermore, performance is guaranteed to be at least as good—and in many cases better—than direct energy estimation without using additional quantum resources, and the approach is thus a very natural alternative for estimating ground state energies directly from classical shadow data.
We introduce a technique to estimate error-mitigated expectation values on noisy quantum computers. Our technique performs shadow tomography on a logical state to produce a memory-efficient classical reconstruction of the noisy density matrix. Using efficient classical post-processing, one can mitigate errors by projecting a general nonlinear function of the noisy density matrix into the codespace. The subspace expansion and virtual distillation can be viewed as special cases of the new framekwork. We show our method is favorable in the quantum and classical resources overhead. Relative to subspace expansion which requires O(2N) samples to estimate a logical Pauli observable with [[N,k]] error correction code, our technique requires only O(4k) samples. Relative to virtual distillation, our technique can compute powers of the density matrix without additional copies of quantum states or quantum memory. We present numerical evidence using logical states encoded with up to sixty physical qubits and show fast convergence to error-free expectation values with only 105 samples under 1% depolarizing noise.
We present shadow spectroscopy as a simulator-agnostic quantum algorithm for estimating energy gaps using very few circuit repetitions (shots) and no extra resources (ancilla qubits) beyond performing time evolution and measurements. The approach builds on the fundamental feature that every observable property of a quantum system must evolve according to the same harmonic components: we can reveal them by postprocessing classical shadows of time-evolved quantum states to extract a large number of time-periodic signals N o ∝ 10 8 , whose frequencies correspond to Hamiltonian energy differences with precision limited as ϵ ∝ 1 / T for simulation time T . We provide strong analytical guarantees that (a) quantum resources scale as O ( log N o ) , while the classical computational complexity is linear O ( N o ) , (b) the signal-to-noise ratio increases with the number of processed signals as ∝ N o , and (c) spectral peak positions are immune to reasonable levels of noise. We demonstrate our approach on model spin systems and the excited-state conical intersection of molecular CH 2 and verify that our method is indeed intuitively easy to use in practice, robust against gate noise, amiable to a new type of algorithmic-error mitigation technique, and uses relatively few shots given a reasonable initial state is supplied—we demonstrate that even 10 shots per time step can be sufficient. Finally, we measured a high-quality, experimental shadow spectrum of a spin chain on readily available IBM quantum computers, achieving the same precision as in noise-free simulations without using any advanced error mitigation, and verified scalability in tensor-network simulations of up to 100-qubit 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.
Quantum subspace expansion (QSE) offers promising avenues to perform spectral calculations on quantum processors but comes with a large measurement overhead. Informationally complete measurements, such as classical shadows, were recently proposed to overcome this bottleneck. Here, we report the first large-scale implementation of QSE with informationally complete measurements. In particular, we probe the quantum phase transition of a spin model with three-body interactions, for which we observe accurate ground state energy recovery and mitigation of local order parameters across system sizes of up to 80 qubits. We achieve this by reformulating QSE as a constrained optimization problem, obtaining rigorous statistical error estimates and avoiding numerical ill conditioning. With over 3×10^{4} measurement basis randomizations per circuit and the evaluation of O(10^{14}) Pauli traces, this represents one of the most significant realizations of classical shadows to date.
Computing inner products of the form tr(AB), where A is a d-dimensional density matrix [with tr(A)=1, A≥0] and B is a bounded-norm observable [Hermitian with tr(B^{2})≤O[poly(logd)] and tr(B) known], is fundamental across quantum science and artificial intelligence. Classically, both computing and storing such inner products require O(d^{2}) resources, which rapidly becomes prohibitive as d grows exponentially. In this Letter, we introduce a quantum approach based on qudit classical shadow tomography, significantly reducing computational complexity from O(d^{2}) down to O[poly(logd)] in typical cases and at least to O[dpoly(logd)] in the worst case. Specifically, for n-qubit systems (with n being the number of qubit and d=2^{n}), our method guarantees efficient estimation of tr(ρO) for any known stabilizer state ρ and arbitrary bounded-norm observable O, using polynomial computational resources. Crucially, it ensures constant-time classical postprocessing per measurement and supports qubit and qudit platforms. Moreover, classical storage complexity of A reduces from O(d^{2}) to O(mlogd), where the sample complexity m is typically exponentially smaller than d^{2}. Our results establish a practical and modular quantum subroutine, enabling scalable quantum advantages in tasks involving high-dimensional data analysis and processing.
Classical shadows are a computationally efficient approach to storing quantum states on a classical computer for the purposes of estimating expectation values of local observables, obtained by performing repeated random measurements. In this note we offer some comments on this approach. We note that the resources needed to form classical shadows with bounded relative error depend strongly on the target state. We then comment on the advantages and limitations of using classical shadows to simulate many-body dynamics. In addition, we introduce the notion of a hybrid shadow, constructed from measurements on a part of the system instead of the entirety, which provides a framework to gain more insight into the nature of shadow states as one reduces the size of the subsystem measured, and a potential alternative to compressing quantum states.