Efficiently estimating average fidelity of a quantum logic gate using few classical random bits

Abstract

We give three new algorithms for efficient in-place estimation, without using ancilla qubits, of average fidelity of a quantum logic gate acting on a d-dimensional system using much fewer random bits than what was known so far. Previous approaches for efficient estimation of average gate fidelity replaced Haar random unitaries in the naive estimation algorithm by approximate unitary 2-designs, and sampled them uniformly and independently. In contrast, in our first algorithm we sample the unitaries of the approximate unitary 2-design uniformly using a limited independence pseudorandom generator, a powerful tool from derandomisation theory. This algorithm uses the same number of basic operations as previous efficient algorithms but much fewer number of random bits. Reducing the requirement of classical random bits increases the reliability of estimation as often, high quality random bits are an expensive computational resource. Our second efficient algorithm, based on a 4-quantum tensor product expander, works if the gate dimension d is large. It uses even lesser random bits than the first algorithm, and has the added advantage that it needs to implement only one unitary versus potentially all the unitaries of an approximate 2-design in the first algorithm. Our third efficient algorithm, based on an l-quantum tensor product expander for moderately large values of l, works for all values of the parameters. It uses slightly more random bits than the other algorithms but has the advantage that it needs to implement only a small number of unitaries versus potentially all the unitaries of an approximate 2-design in the first algorithm. This advantage is of great importance to experimental implementations in the near future.