Fermionic Averaged Circuit Eigenvalue Sampling

Adrian Chapman; Steven T. Flammia

doi:10.22331/q-2026-04-08-2053

Fermionic Averaged Circuit Eigenvalue Sampling

Adrian Chapman¹ and Steven T. Flammia^1,2

¹Phasecraft Inc., Washington DC, USA
²Department of Computer Science, Virginia Tech, Alexandria, VA, USA

Published:	2026-04-08, volume 10, page 2053
Editor:	Aaron Goldberg
Eprint:	arXiv:2504.01936v2
Doi:	https://doi.org/10.22331/q-2026-04-08-2053
Citation:	Quantum 10, 2053 (2026).

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Abstract

Fermionic averaged circuit eigenvalue sampling (FACES) is a protocol to simultaneously learn the averaged error rates of many fermionic linear optical (FLO) gates simultaneously and self-consistently from a suitable collection of FLO circuits. It is highly flexible, allowing for the in situ characterization of FLO-averaged gate-dependent noise under natural assumptions on a family of continuously parameterized one- and two-qubit gates. We rigorously show that our protocol has an efficient sampling complexity, owing in-part to useful properties of the Kravchuk transformations that feature in our analysis. We support our conclusions with numerical results. As FLO circuits become universal with access to certain resource states, we expect our results to inform noise characterization and error mitigation techniques on universal quantum computing architectures which naturally admit a fermionic description.

Featured image: Given a set of noisy fermionic gates we wish to characterize, we model each by its associated noise channel followed by an application of the ideal gate (left). We compose the gates into a collection of circuits according to a design matrix, with accompanying twirled noise channels (right). By sampling from these circuits and fitting to a log-linear model, we learn many underlying noise parameters simultaneously.

Popular summary

Quantum information is extremely fragile, so performing reliable quantum computation requires a complete understanding of the noise affecting our quantum computer. We show that we can achieve such a characterization when our quantum computer is simulating a natural system from the physical world: a gas of noninteracting particles, or fermions. These "free fermion" systems are a natural starting point from which to analyze noise in more powerful models of quantum computation. By taking advantage of the mathematical structure of these systems, we learn a model for the noise of many different free-fermion operations simultaneously. Our work provides a feasible approach for analyzing quantum computing architectures with fermionic structure.

► BibTeX data

@article{Chapman2026fermionicaveraged,
  doi = {10.22331/q-2026-04-08-2053},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.22331/q-2026-04-08-2053},
  title = {Fermionic {A}veraged {C}ircuit {E}igenvalue {S}ampling},
  author = {Chapman, Adrian and Flammia, Steven T.},
  journal = {{Quantum}},
  issn = {2521-327X},
  publisher = {{Verein zur F{\"{o}}rderung des Open Access Publizierens in den Quantenwissenschaften}},
  volume = {10},
  pages = {2053},
  month = apr,
  year = {2026}
}

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Cited by

[1] Lorenzo Grevink, Jonas Haferkamp, Markus Heinrich, Jonas Helsen, Marcel Hinsche, Thomas Schuster, and Zoltán Zimborás, "Will it glue? On short-depth designs beyond the unitary group", arXiv:2506.23925, (2025).

[2] Jędrzej Burkat and Sergii Strelchuk, "A Lightweight Protocol for Matchgate Fidelity Estimation", arXiv:2404.07974, (2024).

The above citations are from SAO/NASA ADS (last updated successfully 2026-08-08 15:02:57). The list may be incomplete as not all publishers provide suitable and complete citation data.

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