Analog simulation of noisy quantum circuits

Abstract

It is well-known that simulating quantum circuits with low but non-zero hardware noise is more difficult than without noise. It requires either to perform density matrix simulations (coming with a space overhead) or to sample over "quantum trajectories" where Kraus operators are inserted randomly (coming with a runtime overhead). We propose a simulation technique based on a representation of hardware noise in terms of trajectories generated by operators that remain close to identity at low noise. This representation significantly reduces the variance over the quantum trajectories, speeding up noisy simulations by factors around $10$ to $100$. As a by-product, we provide a formula to factorize multiple-Pauli channels into a concatenation of single Pauli channels.