In this paper, we introduce a technique for contracting (i.e. numerically evaluating) ZX-diagrams whose complexity scales with their rank-width, a graph parameter that behaves nicely under ZX rewrite rules. Given a rank-decomposition of width
R, our method simulates a graph-like ZX-diagram in
O~(4R) time. Applied to classical simulation of quantum circuits, it is no slower than either naive state vector simulation or stabiliser decompositions with
α=0.5, and in practice can be significantly faster for suitably chosen rank-decompositions. Since finding optimal rank-decompositions is NP-hard, we introduce heuristics that produce good decompositions in practice. We benchmark our simulation routine against Quimb, a popular tensor contraction library, and observe substantial reductions in floating-point operations (often by several orders of magnitude) for random and structured non-Clifford circuits as well as random ZX-diagrams.
It is known that a quantum circuit may be simulated with classical hardware via stabilizer state (T-)decomposition in [Formula: see text] time, given t non-Clifford gates and a decomposition efficiency [Formula: see text]. The past years have seen a number of papers presenting new decompositions of lower [Formula: see text] to reduce this runtime and enable simulation of ever larger circuits. More recently, it has been demonstrated that well-placed applications of apparently weaker (higher [Formula: see text]) decompositions can in fact result in better overall efficiency when paired with the circuit simplification strategies of ZX-calculus. In this work, we take the most generalized T-decomposition (namely vertex cutting), which achieves a poor efficiency of [Formula: see text] and identify common structures to which applying this can, after simplification via ZX-calculus rewriting, yield very strong effective efficiencies [Formula: see text]. By taking into account this broader scope of the ZX-diagram and incorporating the simplification facilitated by the well-motivated cuts, we derive a handful of efficient T-decompositions whose applicabilities are relatively frequent. In benchmarking these new ‘dynamic’ decompositions against the existing alternatives, we observe a significant reduction in overall [Formula: see text] and hence overall runtime for classical simulation, particularly for certain common circuit classes.
A general quantum circuit can be simulated classically in exponential time. If it has a planar layout, then a tensor-network contraction algorithm due to Markov and Shi has a runtime exponential in the square root of its size, or more generally exponential in the treewidth of the underlying graph. Separately, Gottesman and Knill showed that if all gates are restricted to be Clifford, then there is a polynomial time simulation. We combine these two ideas and show that treewidth and planarity can be exploited to improve Clifford circuit simulation. Our main result is a classical algorithm with runtime scaling asymptotically as nω/2 < n1.19 which samples from the output distribution obtained by measuring all n qubits of a planar graph state in given Pauli bases. Here ω is the matrix multiplication exponent. We also provide a classical algorithm with the same asymptotic runtime which samples from the output distribution of any constant-depth Clifford circuit in a planar geometry. Our work improves known classical algorithms with cubic runtime.A key ingredient is a mapping which, given a tree decomposition of some graph G , produces a Clifford circuit with a structure that mirrors the tree decomposition and which emulates measurement of the corresponding graph state. We provide a classical simulation of this circuit with the runtime stated above for planar graphs and otherwise ntω−1 where t is the width of the tree decomposition. Our algorithm incorporates two subroutines which may be of independent interest. The first is a matrix-multiplication-time version of the Gottesman-Knill simulation of multi-qubit measurement on stabilizer states. The second is a new classical algorithm for solving symmetric linear systems over F2 in a planar geometry, extending previous works which only applied to non-singular linear systems in the analogous setting.
Quantum circuits are considered more powerful than classical circuits and require exponential resources to simulate classically. Clifford circuits are a special class of quantum circuits that can be simulated in polynomial time but still show important quantum effects such as entanglement. In this work, we present an algorithm that simulates Clifford circuits by performing Gaussian elimination on a modified adjacency matrix derived from the circuit structure. Our work builds on a ZX-calculus tensor network representation of Clifford circuits that reduces to quantum graph states. We give a concise formula of amplitudes of graph states based on the LDL decomposition of matrices over GF(2), and use it to get efficient algorithms for strong and weak simulation of Clifford circuits using a tree-decomposition-based sparse LDL algorithm. The complexity of our algorithm matches the state of the art for weak graph state simulation and improves the state of the art for strong graph state simulation by taking advantage of Strassen-like fast matrix multiplication. Our algorithm is also efficient when computing many amplitudes or samples of a Clifford circuit. Further, our amplitudes formula provides a new characterization of locally Clifford equivalent graph states as well as an efficient protocol to learn graph states with low-rank adjacency matrices.
One of the state of the art techniques for classically simulating quantum circuits relies on approximating the output state of the circuit by a superposition of stabilizer states. \nIf the number of non-Clifford gates in the circuit is small, such simulations can be very effective. \nThis thesis provides various improvements in this framework. First, we describe an improved method of computing approximate stabilizer decompositions, which reduces the time cost of computing a single term in the decomposition from
O(elln2) to
O(mn2), where
ell is the total number of gates in the circuit, and
m is the number of non-Clifford gates. \nSince this subroutine has to be repeated exponentially many times, this improvement can be significant in practice whenever
ellggm. \nOur method uses a certain re-writing of the circuit, which in some cases allows for a significant amelioration of the exponential scaling of the required classical resources. \n \nFurthermore, we describe a method of constructing exact, low-rank stabilizer decompositions of
ketpsiotimesm, where
ketpsi is either a magic state or an equatorial state. \nFor any single qubit magic state
ketpsi, we find stabilizer decompositions of
ketpsiotimesm with
2mlog2(3)/4 terms. This improves on the best known bound of
2mlog2(7)/6. \nSimilarly, for any single qubit equatorial state
ketpsi, we give a stabilizer decomposition of
ketpsiotimesm with
2m/2 terms. \nTo our knowledge no such decompositions were previously known. \nThese results translate to milder exponential scaling of the classical resources required for estimating probabilities of quantum circuits up to a polynomially small multiplicative error, as well as allowing more types of circuits to be simulated in this way. \n \nWe also consider certain obstructions to classical simulations. \nIt has been argued in various contexts that contextuality and non-locality hamper classical simulations of quantum circuits. \nLinear constraint systems (LCSs) are a generalization of the well-known Peres-Mermin magic square, which has been recently used to prove a separation between the power of constant depth classical and quantum circuits. \n \nWhile binary LCSs have been studied in detail,
d-ary LCSs are less well-understood. In this thesis we consider linear constraint systems modulo
d>2. We give a simple proof, of the previously known fact, that any linear constraint system which admits a quantum solution consisting of generalized Pauli observables in odd dimension must be classically satisfiable. We further prove that, for odd
d, if a Pauli-like commutation relation between two variables in the LCS arises, then it has no quantum solutions in any dimensions, in stark contrast to the even
d case. We apply this result to various examples, for instance showing that many generalizations of the Peres-Mermin magic square do not give rise to a quantum vs. classical satisfiability gap.
Recent work has explored using the stabilizer formalism to classically simulate quantum circuits containing a few non-Clifford gates. The computational cost of such methods is directly related to the notion of s t a b i l i z e r rank , which for a pure state ψ is defined to be the smallest integer χ such that ψ is a superposition of χ stabilizer states. Here we develop a comprehensive mathematical theory of the stabilizer rank and the related approximate stabilizer rank. We also present a suite of classical simulation algorithms with broader applicability and significantly improved performance over the previous state-of-the-art. A new feature is the capability to simulate circuits composed of Clifford gates and arbitrary diagonal gates, extending the reach of a previous algorithm specialized to the Clifford+T gate set. We implemented the new simulation methods and used them to simulate quantum algorithms with 40-50 qubits and over 60 non-Clifford gates, without resorting to high-performance computers. We report a simulation of the Quantum Approximate Optimization Algorithm in which we process superpositions of χ ∼ 10 6 stabilizer states and sample from the full n -bit output distribution, improving on previous simulations which used ∼ 10 3 stabilizer states and sampled only from single-qubit marginals. We also simulated instances of the Hidden Shift algorithm with circuits including up to 64 T gates or 16 CCZ gates; these simulations showcase the performance gains available by optimizing the decomposition of a circuit's non-Clifford components.