Efficient Classical Simulation of Low-Rank-Width Quantum Circuits Using ZX-Calculus

TL;DR

This paper presents a new method for efficiently simulating certain quantum circuits classically by leveraging ZX-calculus and rank-width, achieving faster computations than existing techniques in many cases.

Contribution

It introduces a rank-width-based contraction technique for ZX-diagrams and heuristics for finding good decompositions, improving classical simulation efficiency of quantum circuits.

Findings

Simulation time scales as ~O(4^R) with rank-width R

Significant reduction in floating-point operations compared to Quimb

Effective for non-Clifford circuits and structured ZX-diagrams

Abstract

In this paper, we introduce a technique for contracting (i.e. numerically evaluating) ZX-diagrams whose complexity scales with their rank-width, a graph parameter that behaves nicely under ZX rewrite rules. Given a rank-decomposition of width $R$, our method simulates a graph-like ZX-diagram in $\~O(4^R)$ time. Applied to classical simulation of quantum circuits, it is no slower than either naive state vector simulation or stabiliser decompositions with $\alpha = 0.5$, and in practice can be significantly faster for suitably chosen rank-decompositions. Since finding optimal rank-decompositions is NP-hard, we introduce heuristics that produce good decompositions in practice. We benchmark our simulation routine against Quimb, a popular tensor contraction library, and observe substantial reductions in floating-point operations (often by several orders of magnitude) for random and structured non-Clifford circuits as well as random ZX-diagrams.