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Work on near-term quantum algorithms in the Physical Review Letters

Improving the Hadamard test in quantum algorithms by means of classical shadows.

Improving the Hadamard test in quantum algorithms by means of classical shadows.

This improvement of the important primitive of the Hadamard test in quantum algorithms is in press in the Physical Review Letters. This work combines the usually unused output with techniques of shadow estimation. 

The Hadamard test is naturally suited for the intermediate regime between the current era of noisy quantum devices and complete fault tolerance. Its applications use measurements of the auxiliary qubit to extract information, but disregard the system register completely. Separate advances in classical representations of quantum states via classical shadows allow the implementation of even global classical shadows with shallow circuits.

This work combines the Hadamard test on a single auxiliary readout qubit with classical shadows on the remaining n-qubit work register. We argue that this combination inherits the best of both worlds and discuss statistical phase estimation as a vignette application.

There, we can use the Hadamard test to estimate eigenvalues on the auxiliary qubit, while classical shadows on the remaining n qubits provide access to additional features such as, (i) fidelity with certain pure quantum states, (ii) the initial state's energy and (iii) how pure and how close the initial state is to an eigenstate of the Hamiltonian. Finally, we also discuss how anti-controlled unitaries can further augment this framework.

Warm thanks to the dream team of Paul K. Faehrmann and Richard Kueng for this - once again - wonderful collaboration.


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