As quantum simulators are scaled up to larger system sizes and lower noise rates, non-Markovian noise channels are expected to become dominant. While provably efficient protocols for Markovian models of quantum simulators, either closed system models (described by a Hamiltonian) or open system models (described by a Lindbladian), have been developed, it remains less well understood whether similar protocols for non-Markovian models exist. In this paper, we consider geometrically local lattice models with both quantum and classical non-Markovian noise and show that, under a Gaussian assumption on the noise, we can learn the noise with sample complexity scaling logarithmically with the system size. Our protocol requires preparing the simulator qubits initially in a product state, introducing a layer of single-qubit Clifford gates and measuring product observables.
As quantum simulators are scaled up to larger system sizes and lower noise rates, non-Markovian noise channels are expected to become dominant. While provably efficient protocols for Markovian models of quantum simulators, either closed system models (described by a Hamiltonian) or open system models (described by a Lindbladian), have been developed, it remains less well understood whether similar protocols for non-Markovian models exist. In this paper, we consider geometrically local lattice models with both quantum and classical non-Markovian noise and show that, under a Gaussian assumption on the noise, we can learn the noise with sample complexity scaling logarithmically with the system size. Our protocol requires preparing the simulator qubits initially in a product state, introducing a layer of single-qubit Clifford gates and measuring product observables.
As quantum simulators are scaled up to larger system sizes and lower noise rates, non-Markovian noise channels are expected to become dominant. While provably efficient protocols for Markovian models of quantum simulators, either closed system models (described by a Hamiltonian) or open system models (described by a Lindbladian), have been developed, it remains less well understood whether similar protocols for non-Markovian models exist. In this paper, we consider geometrically local lattice models with both quantum and classical non-Markovian noise and show that, under a Gaussian assumption on the noise, we can learn the noise with sample complexity scaling logarithmically with the system size. Our protocol requires preparing the simulator qubits initially in a product state, introducing a layer of single-qubit Clifford gates and measuring product observables.
Characterizing the dynamics of open quantum systems at the level of microscopic interactions and error mechanisms is essential for calibrating quantum hardware, designing robust simulation protocols, and developing tailored error-correction methods. Under Markovian noise/dissipation, a natural characterization approach is to identify the full Lindbladian generator that gives rise to both coherent (Hamiltonian) and dissipative dynamics. Prior protocols for learning Lindbladians from dynamical data assumed pre-specified interaction structure, which can be restrictive when the relevant noise channels or control imperfections are not known in advance. In this paper, we present a sample-efficient protocol for learning sparse Lindbladians without assuming any a priori structure. Our protocol is ancilla-free, uses only product-state preparations and Pauli-basis measurements, admits provably stable coefficient reconstruction, and achieves near-optimal time resolution, making it compatible with near-term experimental capabilities. Together, this provides a systematic route to scalable characterization of open-system quantum dynamics, especially in settings where the error mechanisms of interest are unknown.
Many-body systems arising in condensed matter physics and quantum optics inevitably couple to the environment and need to be modelled as open quantum systems. While near-optimal algorithms have been developed for simulating many-body quantum dynamics, algorithms for their open system counterparts remain less well investigated. We address the problem of simulating geometrically local many-body open quantum systems interacting with a stationary Gaussian environment. Under a smoothness assumption on the system-environment interaction, we develop near-optimal algorithms that, for a model with N spins and evolution time t, attain a simulation error δ in the system-state with O(Nt(Nt/δ)o(1)) gates, O(t(Nt/δ)o(1)) parallelized circuit depth and O~(N(Nt/δ)o(1)) ancillas. We additionally show that, if only simulating local observables is of interest, then the circuit depth of the digital algorithm can be chosen to be independent of the system size N. This provides theoretical evidence for the utility of these algorithms for simulating physically relevant models, where typically local observables are of interest, on pre-fault tolerant devices. Finally, for the limiting case of Markovian dynamics with commuting jump operators, we propose two algorithms based on sampling a Wiener process and on a locally dilated Hamiltonian construction, respectively. These algorithms reduce the asymptotic gate complexity on N compared to currently available algorithms in terms of the required number of geometrically local gates.
The unavoidable presence of noise is a crucial roadblock for the development of large-scale quantum computers and the ability to characterize quantum noise reliably and efficiently with high precision is essential to scale quantum technologies further. Although estimating an arbitrary quantum channel requires exponential resources, it is expected that physically relevant noise has some underlying local structure, for instance that errors across different qubits have a conditional independence structure. Previous works showed how it is possible to estimate Pauli noise channels with an efficient number of samples in a way that is robust to state preparation and measurement errors, albeit departing from a known conditional independence structure. We present a novel approach for learning Pauli noise channels over n qubits that addresses this shortcoming. Unlike previous works that focused on learning coefficients with a known conditional independence structure, our method learns both the coefficients and the underlying structure. We achieve our results by leveraging a groundbreaking result by Bresler for efficiently learning Gibbs measures and obtain an optimal sample complexity of O(log(n)) to learn the unknown structure of the noise acting on n qubits. This information can then be leveraged to obtain a description of the channel that is close in diamond distance from O(poly(n)) samples. Furthermore, our method is efficient both in the number of samples and postprocessing without giving up on other desirable features such as SPAM-robustness, and only requires the implementation of single qubit Cliffords. In light of this, our novel approach enables the large-scale characterization of Pauli noise in quantum devices under minimal experimental requirements and assumptions.
Fault-tolerant quantum computing requires extremely precise knowledge and control of qubit dynamics during the application of a gate. We develop a data-driven learning protocol for characterizing quantum gates that builds off previous work on learning the Nakajima-Mori-Zwanzig (NMZ) formulation of open system dynamics from time series data, which allows detailed reconstruction of quantum evolution, including non-Markovian dynamics. We demonstrate this learning technique on three different systems: a simulation of a qubit whose dynamics are purely Markovian, a simulation of a driven qubit coupled to stochastic noise produced by an Ornstein-Uhlenbeck process, and trapped-ion experimental data of a driven qubit whose noise environment is not characterized ahead of time. Our technique is able to learn the generators of time evolution, or the NMZ operators, in all three cases and can learn the timescale in which the qubit dynamics can no longer be accurately described by a purely Markovian model. Our technique complements existing quantum gate characterization methods such as gate set tomography by explicitly capturing non-Markovianity in the gate generator, thus allowing for more thorough diagnosis of noise sources.
Many-body open quantum systems, described by Lindbladian master equations, are a rich class of physical models that display complex equilibrium and out-of-equilibrium phenomena which remain to be understood. In this paper, we theoretically analyze noisy analog quantum simulation of geometrically local open quantum systems and provide evidence that this problem both is hard to simulate on classical computers and could be approximately solved on near-term quantum devices. First, given a noiseless quantum simulator, we show that the dynamics of local observables and the fixed-point expectation values of rapidly mixing local observables in geometrically local Lindbladians can be obtained to a precision of ϵ in time that is poly ( ϵ − 1 ) and uniform in system size. Furthermore, we establish that the quantum simulator would provide a superpolynomial advantage, in run-time scaling with respect to the target precision and either the evolution time (when simulating dynamics) or the Lindbladian’s decay rate (when simulating fixed points), over any classical algorithm for these problems, assuming BQP ≠ BPP . We then consider the presence of noise in the quantum simulator in the form of additional geometrically local Lindbladian terms. We show that the simulation tasks considered in this paper are stable to errors; i.e., they can be solved to a noise-limited, but system-size independent, precision. Finally, we establish that, assuming BQP ≠ BPP , there are stable geometrically local Lindbladian simulation problems such that, as the noise rate on the simulator is reduced, classical algorithms must take time superpolynomially longer in the inverse noise rate to attain the same precision as the analog quantum simulator.