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Physical Review A

Efficient quantum process tomography for Clifford circuits

Shichuan Xue, Guang-Yao Huang, Yong Liu, Dongyang Wang, Weixu Shi, Yingwen Liu, Xiang Fu, Anqi Huang, Mingtang Deng, Junjie Wu

Published Sep 20, 2023• 2 citations
Publisher

Abstract

A Clifford circuit is a pivotal tool in quantum computing and has extensive applications in quantum error correction codes and topological quantum computing. Hence, it is essential to benchmark and verify the effect of Clifford circuits against noise and errors. Standard quantum process tomography is a fundamental technique for fully characterizing quantum dynamics, but at the cost of exponential time, space, and computation with an increasing number of qubits. Here, we propose an efficient quantum process tomography method for Clifford circuits. Combining with the stabilizer formalism, we prove theoretically that, for an $n$-qubit Clifford circuit, our method merely needs $m$ ancillary qubits and $\ensuremath{\lceil}n/m\ensuremath{\rceil}$ input stabilizer states to obtain the quantum process. Numerical simulation results show that our method could perfectly rebuild the unknown Clifford quantum circuit with fidelity over $99.99%$ to six qubit cases. Our work provides an efficient and practical approach to benchmark and verify Clifford circuits.

DOI
10.1103/physreva.108.032419

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A Clifford circuit is a pivotal tool in quantum computing and has extensive applications in quantum error correction codes and topological quantum computing. Hence, it is essential to benchmark and verify the effect of Clifford circuits against noise and errors. Standard quantum process tomography is a fundamental technique for fully characterizing quantum dynamics, but at the cost of exponential time, space, and computation with an increasing number of qubits. Here, we propose an efficient quantum process tomography method for Clifford circuits. Combining with the stabilizer formalism, we prove theoretically that, for an nnn-qubit Clifford circuit, our method merely needs mmm ancillary qubits and \ensuremath⌈n/m\ensuremath⌉\ensuremath{\lceil}n/m\ensuremath{\rceil}\ensuremath⌈n/m\ensuremath⌉ input stabilizer states to obtain the quantum process. Numerical simulation results show that our method could perfectly rebuild the unknown Clifford quantum circuit with fidelity over 99.9999.99%99.99 to six qubit cases. Our work provides an efficient and practical approach to benchmark and verify Clifford circuits.
Quantum process tomography is a pivotal technique in fully characterizing quantum dynamics. However, exponential scaling of the Hilbert space with the increasing system size extremely restrains its experimental implementations. Here, we put forward a more efficient, flexible, and error-mitigated method: variational entanglement-assisted quantum process tomography with arbitrary ancillary qubits. Numerically, we simulate up to eight-qubit quantum processes and show that this tomography with m ancillary qubits (0≤m≤n) alleviates the exponential costs on state preparation (from 4^{n} to 2^{n-m}), measurement settings (at least a 1 order of magnitude reduction), and data postprocessing (efficient and robust parameter optimization). Experimentally, we first demonstrate our method on a silicon photonic chip by rebuilding randomly generated one-qubit and two-qubit unitary quantum processes. Further using the error mitigation method, two-qubit quantum processes can be rebuilt with average gate fidelity enhanced from 92.38% to 95.56%. Our Letter provides an efficient and practical approach to process tomography on the noisy quantum computing platforms.
Quantum process tomography is a fundamental and critical benchmarking and certification tool that is capable of fully characterizing an unknown quantum process. Standard quantum process tomography suffers from an exponentially scaling number of measurements and complicated data post-processing due to the curse of dimensionality. On the other hand, non-unitary operators are more realistic cases. In this work, we put forward a variational quantum process tomography method based on the supervised quantum machine learning framework. It approximates the unknown non-unitary quantum process utilizing a relatively shallow depth parametric quantum circuit and fewer input states. Numerically, we verified our method by reconstructing the non-unitary quantum mappings up to eight qubits in two cases: the weighted sum of the randomly generated quantum circuits and the imaginary time evolution of the Heisenberg XXZ spin chain Hamiltonian. Results show that those quantum processes could be reconstructed with high fidelities (>99%) and shallow depth parametric quantum circuits (d≤8), while the number of input states required is at least two orders of magnitude less than the demands of the standard quantum process tomography. Our work shows the potential of the variational quantum process tomography method in characterizing non-unitary operators.
Benchmarking physical devices and verifying logical algorithms are important tasks for scalable fault-tolerant quantum computing. Numerous protocols exist for benchmarking devices before running actual algorithms. In this work, we show that both physical and logical errors of fault-tolerant circuits can even be characterized in-situ using syndrome data. To achieve this, we map general fault-tolerant Clifford circuits to subsystem codes using the spacetime code formalism and develop a scheme for estimating Pauli noise in Clifford circuits using syndrome data. We give necessary and sufficient conditions for the learnability of physical and logical noise from given syndrome data, and show that we can accurately predict logical fidelities from the same data. Importantly, our approach requires only a polynomial sample size, even when the logical error rate is exponentially suppressed by the code distance, and thus gives an exponential advantage against methods that use only logical data such as direct fidelity estimation. We demonstrate the practical applicability of our methods in various scenarios using synthetic data as well as the experimental data from a recent demonstration of fault-tolerant circuits by Bluvstein et al. [Nature 626, 7997 (2024)]. Our methods provide an efficient, in-situ way of characterizing a fault-tolerant quantum computer to help gate calibration, improve decoding accuracy, and verify logical circuits.
Quantum process tomography is an experimental technique to fully characterize an unknown quantum process. Standard quantum process tomography suffers from exponentially scaling of the number of measurements with the increasing system size. In this work, we put forward a quantum machine learning algorithm which approximately encodes the unknown unitary quantum process into a relatively shallow depth parametric quantum circuit. We demonstrate our method by reconstructing the unitary quantum processes resulting from the quantum Hamiltonian evolution and random quantum circuits up to eight qubits. Results show that those quantum processes could be reconstructed with high fidelity, while the number of input states required are at least two orders of magnitude less than required by the standard quantum process tomography.
Characterizing a quantum system by learning its state or evolution is a fundamental problem in quantum physics and learning theory with a myriad of applications. Recently, as a new approach to this problem, the task of agnostic state tomography was defined, in which one aims to approximate an arbitrary quantum state by a simpler one in a given class. Generalizing this notion to quantum processes, we initiate the study of agnostic process tomography: given query access to an unknown quantum channel Φ and a known concept class C of channels, output a quantum channel that approximates Φ as well as any channel in the concept class C , up to some error. In this work, we propose several natural applications for this new task in quantum machine learning, quantum metrology, classical simulation, and error mitigation. In addition, we give efficient agnostic process tomography algorithms for a wide variety of concept classes, including Pauli strings, Pauli channels, quantum junta channels, low-degree channels, and a class of channels produced by Q A C 0 circuits. The main technical tool we use is Pauli spectrum analysis of operators and superoperators. We also prove that, using ancilla qubits, any agnostic state tomography algorithm can be extended to one solving agnostic process tomography for a compatible concept class of unitaries, immediately giving us efficient agnostic learning algorithms for Clifford circuits, Clifford circuits with few T gates, and circuits consisting of a tensor product of single-qubit gates. Together, our results provide insight into the conditions and new algorithms necessary to extend the learnability of a concept class from the standard tomographic setting to the agnostic one.
The impressive pace of advance of quantum technology calls for robust and scalable techniques for the characterization and validation of quantum hardware. Quantum process tomography, the reconstruction of an unknown quantum channel from measurement data, remains the quintessential primitive to completely characterize quantum devices. However, due to the exponential scaling of the required data and classical post-processing, its range of applicability is typically restricted to one- and two-qubit gates. Here, we present a technique for performing quantum process tomography that addresses these issues by combining a tensor network representation of the channel with a data-driven optimization inspired by unsupervised machine learning. We demonstrate our technique through synthetically generated data for ideal one- and two-dimensional random quantum circuits of up to 10 qubits, and a noisy 5-qubit circuit, reaching process fidelities above 0.99 using several orders of magnitude fewer (single-qubit) measurement shots than traditional tomographic techniques. Our results go far beyond state-of-the-art, providing a practical and timely tool for benchmarking quantum circuits in current and near-term quantum computers.