Simulating Quantum Circuits Using Efficient Tensor Network Contraction Algorithms with Subexponential Upper Bound.

We derive a rigorous upper bound on the classical computation time of finite-ranged tensor network contractions in d≥2 dimensions. Consequently, we show that quantum circuits of single-qubit and finite-ranged two-qubit gates can be classically simulated in subexponential time in the number of gates. Moreover, we present and implement an algorithm guaranteed to meet our bound and which finds contraction orders with vastly lower computational times in practice. In practically relevant cases this beats standard simulation schemes and, for certain quantum circuits, also a state-of-the-art method. Specifically, our algorithm leads to speedups of several orders of magnitude over naive contraction schemes for two-dimensional quantum circuits on as little as an 8×8 lattice. We obtain similarly efficient contraction schemes for Google's Sycamore-type quantum circuits, instantaneous quantum polynomial-time circuits, and nonhomogeneous (2+1)-dimensional random quantum circuits.

Efficient Classical Simulation and Benchmarking of Quantum Processes in the Weyl Basis.

One of the crucial steps in building a scalable quantum computer is to identify the noise sources which lead to errors in the process of quantum evolution. Different implementations come with multiple hardware-dependent sources of noise and decoherence making the problem of their detection manyfoldly more complex. We develop a randomized benchmarking algorithm which uses Weyl unitaries to efficiently identify and learn a mixture of error models which occur during the computation. We provide an efficiently computable estimate of the overhead required to compute expectation values on outputs of the noisy circuit relying only on the locality of the interactions and no further assumptions on the circuit structure. The overhead decreases with the noise rate and this enables us to compute analytic noise bounds that imply efficient classical simulability. We apply our methods to ansatz circuits that appear in the variational quantum eigensolver and establish an upper bound on classical simulation complexity as a function of noise, identifying regimes when they become classically efficiently simulatable.

Quantum advantage of unitary Clifford circuits with magic state inputs.

We study the computational power of unitary Clifford circuits with solely magic state inputs (CM circuits), supplemented by classical efficient computation. We show that CM circuits are hard to classically simulate up to multiplicative error (assuming polynomial hierarchy non-collapse), and also up to additive error under plausible average-case hardness conjectures. Unlike other such known classes, a broad variety of possible conjectures apply. Along the way, we give an extension of the Gottesman-Knill theorem that applies to universal computation, showing that for Clifford circuits with joint stabilizer and non-stabilizer inputs, the stabilizer part can be eliminated in favour of classical simulation, leaving a Clifford circuit on only the non-stabilizer part. Finally, we discuss implementational advantages of CM circuits.

Quantum Schur Sampling Circuits can be Strongly Simulated.

Permutational quantum computing (PQC) [Quantum Inf. Comput., 10, 470-497 (2010)QICUAW1533-7146] is a natural quantum computational model conjectured to capture nonclassical aspects of quantum computation. An argument backing this conjecture was the observation that there was no efficient classical algorithm for estimation of matrix elements of the S_{n} irreducible representation matrices in the Young's orthogonal form, which correspond to transition amplitudes of a broad class of PQC circuits. This problem can be solved with a PQC machine in polynomial time, but no efficient classical algorithm for the problem was previously known. Here we give a classical algorithm that efficiently approximates the transition amplitudes up to polynomial additive precision and hence solves this problem. We further extend our discussion to show that transition amplitudes of a broader class of quantum circuits-the quantum Schur sampling circuits-can also be efficiently classically approximated.

Port-based teleportation in arbitrary dimension.

Port-based teleportation (PBT), introduced in 2008, is a type of quantum teleportation protocol which transmits the state to the receiver without requiring any corrections on the receiver's side. Evaluating the performance of PBT was computationally intractable and previous attempts succeeded only with small systems. We study PBT protocols and fully characterize their performance for arbitrary dimensions and number of ports. We develop new mathematical tools to study the symmetries of the measurement operators that arise in these protocols and belong to the algebra of partially transposed permutation operators. First, we develop the representation theory of the mentioned algebra which provides an elegant way of understanding the properties of subsystems of a large system with general symmetries. In particular, we introduce the theory of the partially reduced irreducible representations which we use to obtain a simpler representation of the algebra of partially transposed permutation operators and thus explicitly determine the properties of any port-based teleportation scheme for fixed dimension in polynomial time.

Quantum communication complexity advantage implies violation of a Bell inequality.

We obtain a general connection between a large quantum advantage in communication complexity and Bell nonlocality. We show that given any protocol offering a sufficiently large quantum advantage in communication complexity, there exists a way of obtaining measurement statistics that violate some Bell inequality. Our main tool is port-based teleportation. If the gap between quantum and classical communication complexity can grow arbitrarily large, the ratio of the quantum value to the classical value of the Bell quantity becomes unbounded with the increase in the number of inputs and outputs.

Quantum Conditional Mutual Information, Reconstructed States, and State Redistribution.

We give two strengthenings of an inequality for the quantum conditional mutual information of a tripartite quantum state recently proved by Fawzi and Renner, connecting it with the ability to reconstruct the state from its bipartite reductions. Namely, we show that the conditional mutual information is an upper bound on the regularized relative entropy distance between the quantum state and its reconstructed version. It is also an upper bound for the measured relative entropy distance of the state to its reconstructed version. The main ingredient of the proof is the fact that the conditional mutual information is the optimal quantum communication rate in the task of state redistribution.

Superadditivity of Private Information for Any Number of Uses of the Channel.

The quantum capacity of a quantum channel is always smaller than the capacity of the channel for private communication. Both quantities are given by the infinite regularization of the coherent and the private information, respectively, which makes their evaluation very difficult. Here, we construct a family of channels for which the private and coherent information can remain strictly superadditive for unbounded number of uses, thus demonstrating that the regularization is necessary. We prove this by showing that the coherent information is strictly larger than the private information of a smaller number of uses of the channel. This implies that even though the quantum capacity is upper bounded by the private capacity, the nonregularized quantities can be interleaved.

Unbounded number of channel uses may be required to detect quantum capacity.

Transmitting data reliably over noisy communication channels is one of the most important applications of information theory, and is well understood for channels modelled by classical physics. However, when quantum effects are involved, we do not know how to compute channel capacities. This is because the formula for the quantum capacity involves maximizing the coherent information over an unbounded number of channel uses. In fact, entanglement across channel uses can even increase the coherent information from zero to non-zero. Here we study the number of channel uses necessary to detect positive coherent information. In all previous known examples, two channel uses already sufficed. It might be that only a finite number of channel uses is always sufficient. We show that this is not the case: for any number of uses, there are channels for which the coherent information is zero, but which nonetheless have capacity.

Generalized teleportation and entanglement recycling.

We introduce new teleportation protocols which are generalizations of the original teleportation protocols that use the Pauli group and the port-based teleportation protocols, introduced by Hiroshima and Ishizaka, that use the symmetric permutation group. We derive sufficient conditions for a set of operations, which in general need not form a group, to give rise to a teleportation protocol and provide examples of such schemes. This generalization leads to protocols with novel properties and is needed to push forward new schemes of computation based on them. Port-based teleportation protocols and our generalizations use a large resource state consisting of N singlets to teleport only a single qubit state reliably. We provide two distinct protocols which recycle the resource state to teleport multiple states with error linearly increasing with their number. The first protocol consists of sequentially teleporting qubit states, and the second teleports them in a bulk.

When does noise increase the quantum capacity?

Superactivation is the property that two channels with zero quantum capacity can be used together to yield a positive capacity. Here we demonstrate that this effect exists for a wide class of inequivalent channels, none of which can simulate each other. We also consider the case where one of two zero-capacity channels is applied, but the sender is ignorant of which one is applied. We find examples where the greater the entropy of mixing of the channels, the greater the lower bound for the capacity. Finally, we show that the effect of superactivation is rather generic by providing an example of superactivation using the depolarizing channel.