Breaking the Treewidth Barrier in Quantum Circuit Simulation with Decision Diagrams

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Cheng, Bin, Wang, Ziyuan, Deng, Ruixuan, Chen, Jianxin, Ji, Zhengfeng
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Cheng, Bin
Wang, Ziyuan
Deng, Ruixuan
Chen, Jianxin
Ji, Zhengfeng
author_facet Cheng, Bin
Wang, Ziyuan
Deng, Ruixuan
Chen, Jianxin
Ji, Zhengfeng
contents Classical simulation of quantum circuits is a critical tool for validating quantum hardware and probing the boundary between classical and quantum computational power. Existing state-of-the-art methods, notably tensor network approaches, have computational costs governed by the treewidth of the underlying circuit graph, making circuits with large treewidth intractable. This work rigorously analyzes FeynmanDD, a decision diagram-based simulation method proposed in CAV 2025 by a subset of the authors, and shows that the size of the multi-terminal decision diagram used in FeynmanDD is exponential in the linear rank-width of the circuit graph. As linear rank-width can be substantially smaller than treewidth and is at most larger than the treewidth by a logarithmic factor, our analysis demonstrates that FeynmanDD outperforms all tensor network-based methods for certain circuit families. We also show that the method remains efficient if we use the Solovay-Kitaev algorithm to expand arbitrary single-qubit gates to sequences of Hadamard and T gates, essentially removing the gate-set restriction posed by the method.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2510_06775
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Breaking the Treewidth Barrier in Quantum Circuit Simulation with Decision Diagrams
Cheng, Bin
Wang, Ziyuan
Deng, Ruixuan
Chen, Jianxin
Ji, Zhengfeng
Quantum Physics
Data Structures and Algorithms
Classical simulation of quantum circuits is a critical tool for validating quantum hardware and probing the boundary between classical and quantum computational power. Existing state-of-the-art methods, notably tensor network approaches, have computational costs governed by the treewidth of the underlying circuit graph, making circuits with large treewidth intractable. This work rigorously analyzes FeynmanDD, a decision diagram-based simulation method proposed in CAV 2025 by a subset of the authors, and shows that the size of the multi-terminal decision diagram used in FeynmanDD is exponential in the linear rank-width of the circuit graph. As linear rank-width can be substantially smaller than treewidth and is at most larger than the treewidth by a logarithmic factor, our analysis demonstrates that FeynmanDD outperforms all tensor network-based methods for certain circuit families. We also show that the method remains efficient if we use the Solovay-Kitaev algorithm to expand arbitrary single-qubit gates to sequences of Hadamard and T gates, essentially removing the gate-set restriction posed by the method.
title Breaking the Treewidth Barrier in Quantum Circuit Simulation with Decision Diagrams
topic Quantum Physics
Data Structures and Algorithms
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.06775