Classically Estimating Observables of Noiseless Quantum Circuits
We present a classical algorithm based on Pauli propagation for estimating expectation values of arbitrary observables on random unstructured quantum circuits across all circuit architectures and depths, including those with all-to-all connectivity. We prove that, for any architecture where each circuit layer is randomly sampled from a distribution invariant under single-qubit rotations, our algorithm achieves a small error ϵ on all circuits except for a small fraction δ. The computational time is polynomial in qubit count and circuit depth for any small constant ϵ, δ and quasipolynomial for inverse-polynomially small ϵ, δ. Our results show that estimating observables of quantum circuits exhibiting chaotic and locally scrambling behavior is classically tractable across all geometries.
Authors
- Armando Angrisani (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7643-2892)
- Hsin-Yuan Huang (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5317-2613)
- Manuel S. Rudolph (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1261-1442)
- Alexander Schmidhuber (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2241-5480)
- Zoë Holmes (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6841-4507)
- M. Cerezo (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2757-3170)
Institutions
- California Institute of Technology (US)
- Google (United States) (US)
- Los Alamos National Laboratory (US)
- École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (CH)
- Massachusetts Institute of Technology (US)
Publication Details
- Journal
- Physical Review Letters
- Published
- 2025-09-08
- DOI
- https://doi.org/10.1103/lh6x-7rc3
- Citations
- 7
- Primary Topic
- Quantum Computing Algorithms and Architecture
- Type
- article
- Field-Weighted Citation Impact
- 17.37