Noise gates for decoherent quantum circuits

TL;DR

This paper introduces noise gates derived from stochastic differential equations to model and simulate the effects of Markovian and non-Markovian noise in quantum circuits, simplifying analysis and computation.

Contribution

It presents a novel formalism of noise gates based on SDEs that simplifies the modeling of noise effects in quantum circuits, including non-Markovian noise.

Findings

Noise gates can be manipulated like standard quantum gates.

The approach is equivalent to Lindblad equation results.

Facilitates fast numerical simulations of noisy quantum circuits.

Abstract

A major problem in exploiting microscopic systems for developing a new technology based on the principles of Quantum Information is the influence of noise which tends to work against the quantum features of such systems. It becomes then crucial to understand how noise affects the evolution of quantum circuits: several techniques have been proposed among which stochastic differential equations (SDEs) can represent a very convenient tool. We show how SDEs naturally map any Markovian noise into a linear operator, which we will call a noise gate, acting on the wave function describing the state of the circuit, and we will discuss some examples. We shall see that these gates can be manipulated like any standard quantum gate, thus simplifying in certain circumstances the task of computing the overall effect of the noise at each stage of the protocol. This approach yields equivalent results to those derived from the Lindblad equation; yet, as we show, it represents a handy and fast tool for performing computations, and moreover, it allows for fast numerical simulations and generalizations to non Markovian noise. In detail we review the depolarizing channel and the generalized amplitude damping channel in terms of this noise gate formalism and show how these techniques can be applied to any quantum circuit.