Constant-depth adaptive preparation of Dicke and symmetric states
Efficient preparation of Dicke states and, more generally, permutation-symmetric states is important for quantum metrology, quantum networking, and collective quantum information processing. Measurements and classical feedforward enable low-depth preparations of these states, with a cost of ancillary qubits. In this work, we introduce an exact constant-depth adaptive preparation protocol for arbitrary Dicke-$(n,k)$ states and further symmetric states. We first provide a protocol preparing the uniform subset superposition state, as a primitive, using constant-depth adaptive circuit with $O(k^2\log^2 n)$ ancillary qubits and success probability at least $1/k$. This yields an exact, probabilistic, constant-depth Dicke-state preparation protocol using $O\left(n^2+k^2\log^2 n+kn\log n\log\log n\right)$ ancillary qubits. Parallel repetition suppresses the failure probability exponentially without increasing the quantum depth. Moreover, the uniform subset superposition state is also of independent interest as the uniform vertex state of the Johnson graph and as the compact uniform subset state appearing in quantum-walk and topological-data-analysis algorithms. We further establish a general lifting framework that coherently combines clean unitary Dicke-state preparation circuits to prepare arbitrary symmetric states with only polynomial ancillary overhead. Combined with recent constant-depth unitary Dicke-state constructions, this gives an exact constant-depth preparation protocol for arbitrary $n$-qubit symmetric states using $O(n^3\sqrt{\log n})$ ancillary qubits.