Noisy Stabilizer Formalism

TL;DR

This paper introduces a noisy stabilizer formalism that efficiently models the evolution of stabilizer states under Clifford operations, Pauli measurements, and various noise processes, enabling scalable analysis of noisy quantum systems.

Contribution

It extends the stabilizer formalism to include noise processes, allowing efficient simulation of noisy stabilizer states under local measurements and noise.

Findings

Scales linearly with initial qubits

Handles correlated and uncorrelated noise

Enables efficient description of multipartite entanglement

Abstract

Despite the exponential overhead to describe general multi-qubit quantum states and processes, efficient methods for certain state families and operations have been developed and utilised. The stabilizer formalism and the Gottesman-Knill theorem, where pure stabilizer or graph states are manipulated by Clifford operations and Pauli measurements, are prominent examples, and these states play a major role in many applications in quantum technologies. Here we develop a noisy stabilizer formalism, i.e., a method that allows one not only to efficiently describe and follow pure states under Clifford operations and Pauli measurements but also Pauli noise processes acting on such stabilizer states, including uncorrelated and correlated dephasing and single- or multi-qubit depolarizing noise. The method scales linearly in the number of qubits of the initial state, but exponentially in the size of the target state. Thus, whenever a noisy stabilizer state is manipulated by means of local Pauli measurements such that a multipartite entangled state of a few qubits is generated, one can efficiently describe the resulting state.