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arXiv:2605.19205

Quantum Accreditation with Non-Clifford Two-qubit Gates

Andrew Jackson, Theodoros Kapourniotis, Animesh Datta

quant-phSubmitted May 19, 2026• Announced May 20, 2026• 0 citations
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Abstract

We develop a family of quantum accreditation protocols for quantum circuits with non-Clifford two-qubit gates. The latter includes families of gates such as the fSim and XY families of gates, native to existing hardwares. We provide practical and scalable protocols that upper-bound the total variation distance between the probability distributions of error-free and erroneous quantum computations. We also establish the robustness of our protocols to small perturbations and generalize Pauli twirling to non-Pauli single-qubit bases, which may be of independent interest.

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We develop a family of quantum accreditation protocols for quantum circuits with non-Clifford two-qubit gates. The latter includes families of gates such as the fSim and XY families of gates, native to existing hardwares. We provide practical and scalable protocols that upper-bound the total variation distance between the probability distributions of error-free and erroneous quantum computations. We also establish the robustness of our protocols to small perturbations and generalize Pauli twirling to non-Pauli single-qubit bases, which may be of independent interest.
We provide and experimentally demonstrate an accreditation protocol that upper bounds the variation distance between noisy and noiseless probability distributions of the outputs of arbitrary quantum computations. We accredit the outputs of 24 quantum circuits executed on programmable superconducting hardware, ranging from depth-9 circuits on 10 qubits to depth-21 circuits on 4 qubits. Our protocol requires implementing the ``target'' quantum circuit along with a number of random Clifford circuits and subsequently postprocessing the outputs of these Clifford circuits. Importantly, the number of Clifford circuits is chosen to obtain the bound with the desired confidence and accuracy and is independent of the size and nature of the target circuit. We thus demonstrate a practical and scalable method of ascertaining the correctness of the outputs of arbitrary-sized noisy quantum computers---the ultimate arbiter of the utility of the computer itself.
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Quantum gate benchmarking is unavoidably influenced by state preparation and measurement errors. Randomized benchmarking addresses this challenge by employing group twirling to regularize the noise channel, then provides a characterization of quantum channels that is robust to these errors through exponential fittings. In practice, local twirling gates are preferred due to their high fidelity and experimental feasibility. However, while existing RB methods leveraging local twirling gates are effective for benchmarking Clifford gates, they face fundamental challenges in benchmarking non-Clifford gates. In this work, we solve this problem by introducing the Pauli Transfer Character Benchmarking. This protocol estimates the Pauli transfer matrix elements for a quantum channel using only local Pauli operations. Building on this protocol, we develop a fidelity benchmarking method for non-Clifford gates UUU satisfying U2=IU^2=IU2=I. We validate the feasibility of our protocol through numerical simulations applied to Toffoli gates as a concrete example.
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We present an accreditation protocol for analogue, i.e., continuous-time, quantum simulators. For a given simulation task, it provides an upper bound on the variation distance between the probability distributions at the output of an erroneous and error-free analogue quantum simulator. As its overheads are independent of the size and nature of the simulation, the protocol is ready for immediate usage and practical for the long term. It builds on the recent theoretical advances of strongly universal Hamiltonians and quantum accreditation as well as experimental progress toward the realization of programmable hybrid analogue-digital quantum simulators.
Developing space- and time-efficient logical magic state preparation protocols will likely be an essential step towards building a large-scale fault-tolerant quantum computer. Motivated by this need, we introduce a scalable method for simulating logical magic state preparation protocols under the standard circuit-level noise model. When applied to protocols based on code switching, magic state cultivation, and magic state distillation, our method yields a complexity polynomial in (i) the number of qubits and (ii) the non-stabilizerness, e.g., stabilizer rank or Pauli rank, of the target encoded magic state. The efficiency of our simulation method is rooted in a curious fact: every circuit-level Pauli error in these protocols propagates to a Clifford error at the end. This property is satisfied by a large family of protocols, including those that repeatedly measure a transversal Clifford that squares to a Pauli. We provide a proof-of-principle numerical simulation that prepares a magic state using such logical Clifford measurements. Our work enables practical simulation of logical magic state preparation protocols without resorting to approximations or resource-intensive state-vector simulations.