Improving shadow estimation with locally-optimal dual frames

Abstract

Accurate estimation of observables in quantum systems is a central challenge in quantum information science, yet practical implementations are fundamentally constrained by the limited number of measurement shots. In this work we explore a variation of the classical shadows protocol in which the measurements are kept local while allowing the resulting classical shadows themselves to be correlated. By constructing locally optimal shadows, we obtain unbiased estimators that are competitive with state-of-the-art methods in terms of measurement overhead, while requiring only single-qubit measurements and allowing for the estimation of any observable in pure post-processing, reducing estimation errors by orders of magnitude over standard classical shadows. We validate our approach through numerical experiments on molecular Hamiltonians with up to 40 qubits consistently observing significant reductions in estimation errors, including for estimations of multiple chemically relevant observables simultaneously.