Multivariate trace estimation in constant quantum depth
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There is a folkloric belief that a depth-Θ(m) quantum circuit is needed to estimate the trace of the product of m density matrices (i.e., a multivariate trace). We prove that this belief is overly conservative by constructing a constant quantum-depth circuit for the task, inspired by the method of Shor error correction. Furthermore, our circuit demands only local gates in a two dimensional circuit – we show how to implement it in a highly parallelized way on an architecture similar to that of Google's Sycamore processor. With these features, our algorithm brings the task of multivariate trace estimation, crucial to applications in condensed matter and estimating nonlinear functions of quantum states, closer to the capabilities of near-term quantum processors. We instantiate the latter application with a theorem on estimating nonlinear functions of quantum states with “well-behaved" polynomial approximations.
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