paper

Quantifying magic for multi-qubit operations

arXiv:1901.03322 · doi:10.1098/rspa.2019.0251

Abstract

The development of a framework for quantifying "non-stabiliserness" of quantum operations is motivated by the magic state model of fault-tolerant quantum computation, and by the need to estimate classical simulation cost for noisy intermediate-scale quantum (NISQ) devices. The robustness of magic was recently proposed as a well-behaved magic monotone for multi-qubit states and quantifies the simulation overhead of circuits composed of Clifford+T gates, or circuits using other gates from the Clifford hierarchy. Here we present a general theory of the "non-stabiliserness" of quantum operations rather than states, which are useful for classical simulation of more general circuits. We introduce two magic monotones, called channel robustness and magic capacity, which are well-defined for general n-qubit channels and treat all stabiliser-preserving CPTP maps as free operations. We present two complementary Monte Carlo-type classical simulation algorithms with sample complexity given by these quantities and provide examples of channels where the complexity of our algorithms is exponentially better than previous known simulators. We present additional techniques that ease the difficulty of calculating our monotones for special classes of channels.

arXiv comment25+15 pages, 6 figures, 2 algorithms, 4 tables; Author final preprint copy. Revisions since v1: Sections 3 and 6 discuss consistency condition for third-level gates; Section 7A restructured and expanded; Appendix E2 now includes additional details on existence of decompositions for diagonal channels; typos corrected

References in corpus (48)

Cited by in corpus (77)