Despite the exponential overhead to describe general multiqubit quantum states and processes, efficient methods for certain state families and operations have been developed and utilized. The stabilizer formalism and the Gottesman-Knill theorem, where pure stabilizer or graph states are manipulated by Clifford operations and Pauli measurements, are prominent examples, and these states play a major role in many applications in quantum technologies. Here we develop a noisy stabilizer formalism, i.e., a method that allows one to efficiently describe and follow not only pure states under Clifford operations and Pauli measurements but also Pauli noise processes acting on such stabilizer states, including uncorrelated and correlated dephasing and single- or multiple-qubit depolarizing noise. The method scales linearly in the number of qubits of the initial state, but exponentially in the size of the target state. Thus, whenever a noisy stabilizer state is manipulated by means of local Pauli measurements such that a multipartite entangled state of a few qubits is generated, one can efficiently describe the resulting state.
We present a comprehensive and self-contained framework for the efficient classical simulation of Clifford circuits acting on
d-dimensional qudits, including realistic Pauli/Weyl noise via stochastic simulation. Our approach uses the stabilizer tableau formalism for qudits of arbitrary dimension and tracks both stabilizer and destabilizer generators under Clifford updates. The classical simulation remains efficient with simple algebraic Clifford update rules over
Zd. Computational basis measurements in prime dimensions are handled by a generalized Aaronson-Gottesman (CHP) procedure. In composite dimensions,
Zd is not a field and the standard tableau reduction fails, so we employ an exact Smith normal form decomposition to enable efficient sampling. Noise is modelled as probabilistic mixtures of Weyl operators that act only on the tableau's phase column. For fast simulation of noisy circuits, we support Pauli frames, respectively generalized Weyl frames, and introduce a noise-pushing technique that allows all noise processes to be consolidated into a single phase update at the end of the circuit. Using this representation, circuit fidelity can be determined entirely by the single accumulated phase-shift parameter
Δτ, reducing fidelity estimation to a simple phase check per shot. Our codebase supports tableau simulation and conventional state-vector and density-matrix backends for qudits, and also includes circuit and tableau visualisations. Additionally, we provide tests and Jupyter notebooks for validation and illustration. This framework forms the basis for a scalable, open-source strong+weak stabilizer simulator including noise and can be found publicly available at https://github.com/QUICK-JKU/QuickQudits.
The stabilizer formalism is a central framework in quantum computing and one of the key building blocks for fault-tolerant quantum computers. According to the Gottesman–Knill theorem, we can efficiently simulate any quantum system consisting of stabilizer states, Clifford gates, and Pauli measurements on a classical computer. A key challenge in developing robust quantum technologies is that physical quantum systems are unavoidably affected by noise, which degrades quantum information. Accurate noise modeling is therefore essential. For stabilizer states, the noisy stabilizer formalism has recently been introduced as a framework for efficiently describing the evolution of graph states subject to Pauli-diagonal noise under Clifford operations and Pauli measurements. In this thesis, we explore and extend this formalism in two directions. First, we generalize the method from graph states to arbitrary stabilizer states, thereby extending the Gottesman-Knill theorem to noisy scenarios. Second, we extend the formalism to handle noise models beyond Pauli-diagonal channels. Moreover, we study the applicability of the noisy stabilizer formalism to entanglement purification protocols.
Stabilizer states and Clifford transformations constitute the tractable backbone of quantum information science, from error correction and fault tolerance to benchmarking and simulation. Although these objects admit compact classical descriptions, many physical and computational workflows still require their explicit dense forms such as a full wavefunction for a stabilizer state or a full matrix for a Clifford transformation. In such explicit output tasks, exponential scaling is unavoidable because the outputs themselves have sizes
2n and
4n. The fundamental question is therefore whether compact stabilizer and Clifford descriptions can be expanded with no additional polynomial overhead. Here we answer this question affirmatively. We present optimal algorithms that materialize an
n-qubit stabilizer state vector in
O(2n) time and a full dense Clifford matrix in
O(4n) time. The same framework also yields an optimal conversion from standard stabilizer check matrices to state vectors and, for every fixed odd prime qudit dimension
ℓ, gives
O(ℓn)-time materialization of qudit stabilizer states. As an additional compact-to-compact result, we design a sign-aware Four Russians method for converting stabilizer check matrices to quadratic forms faster than Gaussian elimination. These results close the asymptotic gap between compact descriptions of the stabilizer formalism and their dense representations.
Recent work has shown that quantum double models can be used to circumvent the Bravyi-Koenig bound. In particular, this is achieved through code-switching protocols in which non-Pauli stabilizer phases appear as intermediate codes. We introduce the
XCd(k) stabilizer formalism, which generalizes the Pauli stabilizer formalism by combining Pauli-
X operators with diagonal operators drawn from a fixed level
k of the Clifford hierarchy on prime-dimensional qudits. This yields a natural class of beyond-Pauli stabilizer models, including many twisted quantum double phases. We classify a large class of these
XCd(k) stabilizer states, showing that they are uniform superpositions over affine-linear subspaces with diagonal phases. In particular, when the stabilizers of a state require operators from level
k of the Clifford hierarchy, we show that the diagonal gates required to produce the phases in the wavefunction sit one level higher. We further show that every 2D twisted quantum double
Dω(Zpn) with
ω a product of type-III cocycles and
p an odd prime admits a realization using only Clifford (
k=2) stabilizers, and we conjecture that phases where
ω contains a type-I or type-II cocycle require level-
p Clifford-hierarchy stabilizers for
p-dimensional qudits. Finally, we demonstrate that a pair of qudit toric codes may be deterministically prepared in a logical magic state by measuring
XCd(k) stabilizers. Together, these results provide a concrete stabilizer framework for topological codes beyond Pauli stabilizer models and their logical gates.
We develop analytical and algorithmic techniques that enable efficient simulation of a broad class of noisy stabilizer circuits. We derive closed-form expressions of expectation values for tensor product of Paulis in circuits with non-deterministic Pauli measurements, yielding an efficient strong simulation method that avoids explicit density matrix construction and enables direct noise parameter sweeps. We introduce a circuit compression framework that reduces the per-sample cost of weak simulation in general noisy stabilizer circuits, including deterministic measurements, by separating parameter-independent preprocessing from sampling. Finally, we extend the analytical framework beyond its standard domain to include a small number of deterministic measurements, general rotations, and non-diagonal noise channels. Our results provide a unified framework for both strong and weak simulation of noisy stabilizer circuits and corresponds to an extension of the noisy stabilizer formalism introduced in \cite{PhysRevA.107.032424}. They offer applications ranging from calculation of the expectation values of entanglement witnesses, determination of reduced states, to energy evaluation.