Southwest Quantum Information and Technology

Dynamical subset sampling of quantum error correcting circuits

Presenting Author: Sascha Heußen, RWTH Aachen University
Contributing Author(s): Manuel Rispler, Markus Müller

Quantum error correcting stabilizer codes enable protection of quantum information against errors during storage and processing. Efficiently simulating faulty gate operations poses numerical challenges beyond circuit depth or large numbers of qubits. More efficient simulation of non-deterministic quantum error correcting protocols, such as Shor-type error correction or flag-qubit based fault-tolerant circuits where intermediate measurements and classical feedback determine the actual circuit sequence to perform the protocol, becomes feasible via dynamical subset sampling. As an importance sampling technique, dynamical subset sampling allows to effectively make use of computational resources to only sample the most relevant sequences of quantum circuits in order to estimate a protocol's logical failure rate with well-defined error bars instead of post-selecting on classical measurement data. We outline the method along with two examples that demonstrate its capabilities to reach a given target variance on the logical failure rate with five orders of magnitude fewer samples than Monte Carlo simulation. Our method naturally allows for efficient simulation of realistic multi-parameter noise models describing faulty quantum processor architectures, e.g. based on trapped ions.

(Session 5 : Thursday from 12:00pm-2:00 pm)