Quantum Advantage in Learning Mixed Unitary Channels

Abstract

We study the task of learning mixed unitary channels using Fisher information, under different quantum resource assumptions including ancilla and concatenation. Our result shows that the asymptotic sample complexity scales as $\frac{r}{d\varepsilon^2}$, where $r$ is the rank of the channel (i.e.\ the number of different unitaries), $d$ is the dimension of the system, and $\varepsilon^2$ is the mean-square error. Thus the critical resource is the ancilla, which mirrors the result in~\cite{chen2022quantum} but in a more precise form, as we point out that $r$ is also important. Additionally, we demonstrate the practical potential of mixed unitary channels by showing that random mixed unitary channels are easy to learn.