Lower Bounds on Learning Pauli Channels with Individual Measurements

Omar Fawzi*, Aadil Oufkir, Daniel Stilck Franca

*Corresponding author for this work

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Abstract

Understanding the noise affecting a quantum device is of fundamental importance for scaling quantum technologies. A particularly important class of noise models is that of Pauli channels, as randomized compiling techniques can effectively bring any quantum channel to this form and are significantly more structured than general quantum channels. In this paper, we show fundamental lower bounds on the sample complexity for learning Pauli channels in diamond norm. We consider strategies that may not use auxiliary systems entangled with the input to the unknown channel and have to perform a measurement before reusing the channel. For non-adaptive algorithms, we show a lower bound of Ω(23nϵ-2) to learn an n-qubit Pauli channel. In particular, this shows that the recently introduced learning procedure by [1] is essentially optimal. In the adaptive setting, we show a lower bound of Ω(22.5nϵ-2) for ϵ = O(2-n), and a lower bound of Ω(22nϵ-2) for any ϵ > 0. This last lower bound holds even in a stronger model where in each step, before performing the measurement, the unknown channel may be used arbitrarily many times sequentially interspersed with unital operations.

Original languageEnglish
JournalIEEE Transactions on Information Theory
ISSN0018-9448
DOIs
Publication statusE-pub ahead of print - 2025

Bibliographical note

Publisher Copyright:
© 1963-2012 IEEE.

Keywords

  • channel estimation
  • Pauli channels

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