No Arabic abstract
In the Bloch sphere picture, one finds the coefficients for expanding a single-qubit density operator in terms of the identity and Pauli matrices. A generalization to $n$ qubits via tensor products represents a density operator by a real vector of length $4^n$, conceptually similar to a statevector. Here, we study this approach for the purpose of quantum circuit simulation, including noise processes. The tensor structure leads to computationally efficient algorithms for applying circuit gates and performing few-qubit quantum operations. In view of variational circuit optimization, we study backpropagation through a quantum circuit and gradient computation based on this representation, and generalize our analysis to the Lindblad equation for modeling the (non-unitary) time evolution of a density operator.
Classical simulations of quantum circuits are limited in both space and time when the qubit count is above 50, the realm where quantum supremacy reigns. However, recently, for the low depth circuit with more than 50 qubits, there are several methods of simulation proposed by teams at Google and IBM. Here, we present a scheme of simulation which can extract a large amount of measurement outcomes within a short time, achieving a 64-qubit simulation of a universal random circuit of depth 22 using a 128-node cluster, and 56- and 42-qubit circuits on a single PC. We also estimate that a 72-qubit circuit of depth 23 can be simulated in about 16 h on a supercomputer identical to that used by the IBM team. Moreover, the simulation processes are exceedingly separable, hence parallelizable, involving just a few inter-process communications. Our work enables simulating more qubits with less hardware burden and provides a new perspective for classical simulations.
The correlation matrices or tensors in the Bloch representation of density matrices are encoded with entanglement properties. In this paper, based on the Bloch representation of density matrices, we give some new separability criteria for bipartite and multipartite quantum states. Theoretical analysis and some examples show that the proposed criteria can be more efficient than the previous related criteria.
Fault-tolerant quantum computing demands many qubits with long lifetimes to conduct accurate quantum gate operations. However, external noise limits the computing time of physical qubits. Quantum error correction codes may extend such limits, but imperfect gate operations introduce errors to the correction procedure as well. The additional gate operations required due to the physical layout of qubits exacerbate the situation. Here, we use density-matrix simulations to investigate the performance change of logical qubits according to quantum error correction codes and qubit layouts and the expected performance of logical qubits with gate operation time and gate error rates. Considering current qubit technology, the small quantum error correction codes are chosen. Assuming 0.1% gate error probability, a logical qubit encoded by a 5-qubit quantum error correction code is expected to have a fidelity 0.25 higher than its physical counterpart.
Building a quantum computer is a daunting challenge since it requires good control but also good isolation from the environment to minimize decoherence. It is therefore important to realize quantum gates efficiently, using as few operations as possible, to reduce the amount of required control and operation time and thus improve the quantum state coherence. Here we propose a superconducting circuit for implementing a tunable system consisting of a qutrit coupled to two qubits. This system can efficiently accomplish various quantum information tasks, including generation of entanglement of the two qubits and conditional three-qubit quantum gates, such as the Toffoli and Fredkin gates. Furthermore, the system realizes a conditional geometric gate which may be used for holonomic (non-adiabatic) quantum computing. The efficiency, robustness and universality of the presented circuit makes it a promising candidate to serve as a building block for larger networks capable of performing involved quantum computational tasks.
The ability to simulate one Hamiltonian with another is an important primitive in quantum information processing. In this paper, a simulation method for arbitrary $sigma_z otimes sigma_z$ interaction based on Hadamard matrices (quant-ph/9904100) is generalized for any pairwise interaction. We describe two applications of the generalized framework. First, we obtain a class of protocols for selecting an arbitrary interaction term in an n-qubit Hamiltonian. This class includes the scheme given in quant-ph/0106064v2. Second, we obtain a class of protocols for inverting an arbitrary, possibly unknown n-qubit Hamiltonian, generalizing the result in quant-ph/0106085v1.