Quantum advantages for Pauli channel estimation

Abstract

We show that entangled measurements provide an exponential advantage in sample complexity for Pauli channel estimation, which is both a fundamental problem and a practically important subroutine for benchmarking near-term quantum devices. The specific task we consider is to simultaneously learn all the eigenvalues of an n-qubit Pauli channel to ±ε precision. We give an estimation protocol with an n-qubit ancilla that succeeds with high probability using only O(n/ε²) copies of the Pauli channel, while prove that any ancilla-free protocol (possibly with adaptive control and channel concatenation) would need at least Ω(2^(n/3)) rounds of measurement. We further study the advantages provided by a small number of ancillas. For the case that a k-qubit ancilla (k≤n) is available, we obtain a sample complexity lower bound of Ω(2^((n−k)/3)) for any non-concatenating protocol, and a stronger lower bound of Ω(n^(2n−k)) for any non-adaptive, non-concatenating protocol, which is shown to be tight. We also show how to apply the ancilla-assisted estimation protocol to a practical quantum benchmarking task in a noise-resilient and sample-efficient manner, given reasonable noise assumptions. Our results provide a practically-interesting example for quantum advantages in learning and also bring new insight for quantum benchmarking.

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