Efficient quantum measurement of Pauli operators in the presence of finite sampling error

TL;DR

This paper introduces optimized strategies for measuring Pauli operators in quantum computing, improving accuracy and efficiency in estimating expectation values despite finite sampling errors.

Contribution

It proposes two metrics for evaluating Pauli grouping effectiveness, introduces the SORTED INSERTION collection strategy, and presents two efficient circuit constructions for simultaneous measurement.

Findings

SORTED INSERTION outperforms traditional greedy algorithms in Pauli grouping.

The proposed circuits reduce the number of two-qubit gates needed for measurement.

Numerical tests show improved accuracy in Variational Quantum Eigensolver applications.

Abstract

Estimating the expectation value of an operator corresponding to an observable is a fundamental task in quantum computation. It is often impossible to obtain such estimates directly, as the computer is restricted to measuring in a fixed computational basis. One common solution splits the operator into a weighted sum of Pauli operators and measures each separately, at the cost of many measurements. An improved version collects mutually commuting Pauli operators together before measuring all operators within a collection simultaneously. The effectiveness of doing this depends on two factors. Firstly, we must understand the improvement offered by a given arrangement of Paulis in collections. In our work, we propose two natural metrics for quantifying this, operating under the assumption that measurements are distributed optimally among collections so as to minimise the overall finite sampling error. Motivated by the mathematical form of these metrics, we introduce SORTED INSERTION, a collecting strategy that exploits the weighting of each Pauli operator in the overall sum. Secondly, to measure all Pauli operators within a collection simultaneously, a circuit is required to rotate them to the computational basis. In our work, we present two efficient circuit constructions that suitably rotate any collection of $k$ independent commuting $n$-qubit Pauli operators using at most $kn-k(k+1)/2$ and $O(kn/\log k)$ two-qubit gates respectively. Our methods are numerically illustrated in the context of the Variational Quantum Eigensolver, where the operators in question are molecular Hamiltonians. As measured by our metrics, SORTED INSERTION outperforms four conventional greedy colouring algorithms that seek the minimum number of collections.