Simulating general noise nearly as cheaply as Pauli noise

Fuente: arXiv
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Auteurs principaux: Myers II, Mark, Teo, Mariesa H., Mishra, Rajesh, Chai, Jing Hao, Ng, Hui Khoon
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2025
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author Myers II, Mark
Teo, Mariesa H.
Mishra, Rajesh
Chai, Jing Hao
Ng, Hui Khoon
author_facet Myers II, Mark
Teo, Mariesa H.
Mishra, Rajesh
Chai, Jing Hao
Ng, Hui Khoon
contents Stabilizer simulation of Clifford quantum circuits - error-correction circuits, Clifford subroutines, etc. - on classical computers has played a central role in our understanding of circuit performance. The stabilizer description, however, restricts the accessible noise one can incorporate into the simulation to Pauli-type noise. More general noise, including coherent errors, may have more severe impact on circuit performance than Pauli noise; yet, such general noise have been difficult to access, much less investigate fully, in numerical simulations. Here, through the use of stratified importance sampling, we show how general noise can be simulated within the stabilizer formalism in reasonable time, with non-unitary noise being nearly as cheap as Pauli noise. Unitary (or coherent) noise can require an order of magnitude more time for the simulation, but nevertheless completes in very reasonable times, a drastic improvement over past approaches that typically fail to converge altogether. Our work thus enables detailed beyond-Pauli understanding of circuit performance in the presence of real device noise, which is rarely Pauli in nature. Among other examples, we present direct simulation results for the performance of the popular rotated planar surface codes under circuit-level general noise, previously available only in limited situations and/or through mappings to efficiently simulatable physical models.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2512_07304
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Simulating general noise nearly as cheaply as Pauli noise
Myers II, Mark
Teo, Mariesa H.
Mishra, Rajesh
Chai, Jing Hao
Ng, Hui Khoon
Quantum Physics
Stabilizer simulation of Clifford quantum circuits - error-correction circuits, Clifford subroutines, etc. - on classical computers has played a central role in our understanding of circuit performance. The stabilizer description, however, restricts the accessible noise one can incorporate into the simulation to Pauli-type noise. More general noise, including coherent errors, may have more severe impact on circuit performance than Pauli noise; yet, such general noise have been difficult to access, much less investigate fully, in numerical simulations. Here, through the use of stratified importance sampling, we show how general noise can be simulated within the stabilizer formalism in reasonable time, with non-unitary noise being nearly as cheap as Pauli noise. Unitary (or coherent) noise can require an order of magnitude more time for the simulation, but nevertheless completes in very reasonable times, a drastic improvement over past approaches that typically fail to converge altogether. Our work thus enables detailed beyond-Pauli understanding of circuit performance in the presence of real device noise, which is rarely Pauli in nature. Among other examples, we present direct simulation results for the performance of the popular rotated planar surface codes under circuit-level general noise, previously available only in limited situations and/or through mappings to efficiently simulatable physical models.
title Simulating general noise nearly as cheaply as Pauli noise
topic Quantum Physics
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.07304