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arXiv:2610.14758

Clifford Invariants and Three-Copy Quantum Tests

Xingya Fan, Yongzhi Luan

quant-phmath.GRmath.RTSubmitted Oct 10, 2026• Announced Oct 13, 2026• 0 citations
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Abstract

We give an explicit treatment of the third tensor power of the Clifford representation on $n$ qutrits, for $n\geq2$. This representation has five pairwise inequivalent irreducible constituents, with multiplicities $1,1,1,1,2$. The decomposition reduces the Clifford twirl of a tensor cube to four real parameters. Two of them are spectral moments of the input. The other two are cubic invariants expressed as sums of cubes of the Weyl characteristic function and the discrete Wigner function. On trace-one Hermitian matrices, the invariant polynomials of degree at most three are spanned by the constant function and four algebraically independent functions. These functions do not separate Clifford orbits. For pure inputs a single parameter suffices. We recover its range and the characterization of its maximum by stabilizer states. We bound the stabilizer fidelity, determine full separability across the three copies in the symmetric family, and recover the criterion for a complex projective $3$-design. We classify the jointly invariant quantum Boolean functions. For stabilizer testing and for testing unknown observables we give explicit bounds on copies and queries. We also give character formulas for the finite projective Clifford groups and record the complete character table for two qutrits.

Comments
GAP code is available in the GitHub repository: https://github.com/luanyongzhi/qutrit-character-table

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We give an explicit treatment of the third tensor power of the Clifford representation on nnn qutrits, for n≥2n\geq2n≥2. This representation has five pairwise inequivalent irreducible constituents, with multiplicities 1,1,1,1,21,1,1,1,21,1,1,1,2. The decomposition reduces the Clifford twirl of a tensor cube to four real parameters. Two of them are spectral moments of the input. The other two are cubic invariants expressed as sums of cubes of the Weyl characteristic function and the discrete Wigner function. On trace-one Hermitian matrices, the invariant polynomials of degree at most three are spanned by the constant function and four algebraically independent functions. These functions do not separate Clifford orbits. For pure inputs a single parameter suffices. We recover its range and the characterization of its maximum by stabilizer states. We bound the stabilizer fidelity, determine full separability across the three copies in the symmetric family, and recover the criterion for a complex projective 333-design. We classify the jointly invariant quantum Boolean functions. For stabilizer testing and for testing unknown observables we give explicit bounds on copies and queries. We also give character formulas for the finite projective Clifford groups and record the complete character table for two qutrits.
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Abstract Schur–Weyl duality is a ubiquitous tool in quantum information. At its heart is the statement that the space of operators that commute with the t -fold tensor powers U⊗tU^{\otimes t}U⊗t U ⊗ t of all unitaries U∈U(d)U\in U(d)U∈U(d) U ∈ U ( d ) is spanned by the permutations of the t tensor factors. In this work, we describe a similar duality theory for tensor powers of Clifford unitaries . The Clifford group is a central object in many subfields of quantum information, most prominently in the theory of fault-tolerance. The duality theory has a simple and clean description in terms of finite geometries. We demonstrate its effectiveness in several applications: We resolve an open problem in quantum property testing by showing that “stabilizerness” is efficiently testable: There is a protocol that, given access to six copies of an unknown state, can determine whether it is a stabilizer state, or whether it is far away from the set of stabilizer states. We give a related membership test for the Clifford group. We find that tensor powers of stabilizer states have an increased symmetry group. Conversely, we provide corresponding de Finetti theorems , showing that the reductions of arbitrary states with this symmetry are well-approximated by mixtures of stabilizer tensor powers (in some cases, exponentially well). We show that the distance of a pure state to the set of stabilizers can be lower-bounded in terms of the sum-negativity of its Wigner function. This gives a new quantitative meaning to the sum-negativity (and the related mana ) – a measure relevant to fault-tolerant quantum computation. The result constitutes a robust generalization of the discrete Hudson theorem . We show that complex projective designs of arbitrary order can be obtained from a finite number (independent of the number of qudits) of Clifford orbits. To prove this result, we give explicit formulas for arbitrary moments of random stabilizer states.
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We consider the problem of testing whether an unknown nnn-qubit quantum state ∣ψ⟩|ψ\rangle∣ψ⟩ is a stabilizer state, with only single-copy access. We give an algorithm solving this problem using O(n)O(n)O(n) copies, and conversely prove that Ω(n)Ω(\sqrt{n})Ω(n​) copies are required for any algorithm. The main observation behind our algorithm is that when repeatedly measuring in a randomly chosen stabilizer basis, stabilizer states are the most likely among the set of all pure states to exhibit linear dependencies in measurement outcomes. Our algorithm is designed to probe deviations from this extremal behavior. For the lower bound, we first reduce stabilizer testing to the task of distinguishing random stabilizer states from the maximally mixed state. We then argue that, without loss of generality, it is sufficient to consider measurement strategies that a) lie in the commutant of the tensor action of the Clifford group and b) satisfy a Positive Partial Transpose (PPT) condition. By leveraging these constraints, together with novel results on the partial transposes of the generators of the Clifford commutant, we derive the lower bound on the sample complexity.
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