Shadow Tomography of Quantum States: Progress and Prospects

Seminar author:Scott Aaronson

Event date and time:12/03/2020 04:30:pm

Event location:https://us02web.zoom.us/j/89605659387?pwd=Rm42SHR2YnJCYWdEWjRHd09hZjB2Zz09

Event contact:

Given an unknown quantum state rho, and a known list of two-outcome measurements E_1,…,E_M, “shadow tomography” is the task of estimating the probability that each E_i accepts rho, by carefully measuring only a few copies of rho. In 2018, I gave the first nontrivial protocol for this task. In 2019, Guy Rothblum and I exploited a new connection between gentle measurement of quantum states and the field of differential privacy, to give a protocol that requires fewer copies of rho in some cases, and has the additional advantage of being online (that is, the measurements are processed one at a time).  Huge challenges remain in making shadow tomography practical with near-term devices; extremely recently Huang, Kueng, and Preskill took some promising steps in that direction.  I’ll survey these developments and the challenges that remain. 

Papers: 

https://www.scottaaronson.com/papers/batch.pdf

https://www.scottaaronson.com/papers/dpgentle.pdf

https://arxiv.org/abs/2002.08953