Multiqubit Clifford groups are unitary 3-designs

Unitary $t$-designs are a ubiquitous tool in many research areas, including randomized benchmarking, quantum process tomography, and scrambling. Despite the intensive efforts of many researchers, little is known about unitary $t$-designs with $t\geq3$ in the literature. We show that the multiqubit Clifford group in any even prime-power dimension is not only a unitary 2-design, but also a 3-design. Moreover, it is a minimal 3-design except for dimension~4. As an immediate consequence, any orbit of pure states of the multiqubit Clifford group forms a complex projective 3-design; in particular, the set of stabilizer states forms a 3-design. In addition, our study is helpful to studying higher moments of the Clifford group, which are useful in many research areas ranging from quantum information science to signal processing. Furthermore, we reveal a surprising connection between unitary 3-designs and the physics of discrete phase spaces and thereby offer a simple explanation of why no discrete Wigner function is covariant with respect to the multiqubit Clifford group, which is of intrinsic interest to studying quantum computation.Comment: 7 pages, published in Phys. Rev.

Kerdock Codes Determine Unitary 2-Designs

The non-linear binary Kerdock codes are known to be Gray images of certain extended cyclic codes of length $N = 2^m$ over $\mathbb{Z}_4$. We show that exponentiating these $\mathbb{Z}_4$-valued codewords by $\imath \triangleq \sqrt{-1}$ produces stabilizer states, that are quantum states obtained using only Clifford unitaries. These states are also the common eigenvectors of commuting Hermitian matrices forming maximal commutative subgroups (MCS) of the Pauli group. We use this quantum description to simplify the derivation of the classical weight distribution of Kerdock codes. Next, we organize the stabilizer states to form $N+1$ mutually unbiased bases and prove that automorphisms of the Kerdock code permute their corresponding MCS, thereby forming a subgroup of the Clifford group. When represented as symplectic matrices, this subgroup is isomorphic to the projective special linear group PSL($2,N$). We show that this automorphism group acts transitively on the Pauli matrices, which implies that the ensemble is Pauli mixing and hence forms a unitary $2$-design. The Kerdock design described here was originally discovered by Cleve et al. (arXiv:1501.04592), but the connection to classical codes is new which simplifies its description and translation to circuits significantly. Sampling from the design is straightforward, the translation to circuits uses only Clifford gates, and the process does not require ancillary qubits. Finally, we also develop algorithms for optimizing the synthesis of unitary $2$-designs on encoded qubits, i.e., to construct logical unitary $2$-designs. Software implementations are available at https://github.com/nrenga/symplectic-arxiv18a, which we use to provide empirical gate complexities for up to $16$ qubits.Comment: 16 pages double-column, 4 figures, and some circuits. Accepted to 2019 Intl. Symp. Inf. Theory (ISIT), and PDF of the 5-page ISIT version is included in the arXiv packag

Randomized benchmarking in measurement-based quantum computing

Randomized benchmarking is routinely used as an efficient method for characterizing the performance of sets of elementary logic gates in small quantum devices. In the measurement-based model of quantum computation, logic gates are implemented via single-site measurements on a fixed universal resource state. Here we adapt the randomized benchmarking protocol for a single qubit to a linear cluster state computation, which provides partial, yet efficient characterization of the noise associated with the target gate set. Applying randomized benchmarking to measurement-based quantum computation exhibits an interesting interplay between the inherent randomness associated with logic gates in the measurement-based model and the random gate sequences used in benchmarking. We consider two different approaches: the first makes use of the standard single-qubit Clifford group, while the second uses recently introduced (non-Clifford) measurement-based 2-designs, which harness inherent randomness to implement gate sequences.Comment: 10 pages, 4 figures, comments welcome; v2 published versio

Permutation Symmetry Determines the Discrete Wigner Function

The Wigner function provides a useful quasiprobability representation of quantum mechanics, with applications in various branches of physics. Many nice properties of the Wigner function are intimately connected with the high symmetry of the underlying operator basis composed of phase point operators: any pair of phase point operators can be transformed to any other pair by a unitary symmetry transformation. We prove that, in the discrete scenario, this permutation symmetry is equivalent to the symmetry group being a unitary 2-design. Such a highly symmetric representation can only appear in odd prime power dimensions besides dimensions 2 and 8. It suffices to single out a unique discrete Wigner function among all possible quasiprobability representations. In the course of our study, we show that this discrete Wigner function is uniquely determined by Clifford covariance, while no Wigner function is Clifford covariant in any even prime power dimension.Comment: 5+2 pages, connection with unitary 2-designs added, accepted by Phys. Rev. Lett. as Editors' Suggestio

Schur-Weyl Duality for the Clifford Group with Applications: Property Testing, a Robust Hudson Theorem, and de Finetti Representations

Schur-Weyl duality is a ubiquitous tool in quantum information. At its heart is the statement that the space of operators that commute with the tensor powers of all unitaries is spanned by the permutations of the tensor factors. In this work, we describe a similar duality theory for tensor powers of Clifford unitaries. The Clifford group is a central object in many subfields of quantum information, most prominently in the theory of fault-tolerance. The duality theory has a simple and clean description in terms of finite geometries. We demonstrate its effectiveness in several applications: (1) We resolve an open problem in quantum property testing by showing that "stabilizerness" is efficiently testable: There is a protocol that, given access to six copies of an unknown state, can determine whether it is a stabilizer state, or whether it is far away from the set of stabilizer states. We give a related membership test for the Clifford group. (2) We find that tensor powers of stabilizer states have an increased symmetry group. We provide corresponding de Finetti theorems, showing that the reductions of arbitrary states with this symmetry are well-approximated by mixtures of stabilizer tensor powers (in some cases, exponentially well). (3) We show that the distance of a pure state to the set of stabilizers can be lower-bounded in terms of the sum-negativity of its Wigner function. This gives a new quantitative meaning to the sum-negativity (and the related mana) -- a measure relevant to fault-tolerant quantum computation. The result constitutes a robust generalization of the discrete Hudson theorem. (4) We show that complex projective designs of arbitrary order can be obtained from a finite number (independent of the number of qudits) of Clifford orbits. To prove this result, we give explicit formulas for arbitrary moments of random stabilizer states.Comment: 60 pages, 2 figure