Abstract
Completely positive and trace-preserving maps characterize physically implementable quantum operations. On the other hand, general linear maps, such as positive but not completely positive maps, which can not be physically implemented, are fundamental ingredients in quantum information, both in theoretical and practical perspectives. This raises the question of how well one can simulate or approximate the action of a general linear map by physically implementable operations. In this work, we introduce a systematic framework to resolve this task using the quasiprobability decomposition technique. We decompose a target linear map into a linear combination of physically implementable operations and introduce the physical implementability measure as the least amount of negative portion that the quasiprobability must pertain, which directly quantifies the cost of simulating a given map using physically implementable quantum operations. We show this measure is efficiently computable by semidefinite programs and prove several properties of this measure, such as faithfulness, additivity, and unitary invariance. We derive lower and upper bounds in terms of the Choi operator’s trace norm and obtain analytic expressions for several linear maps of practical interests. Furthermore, we endow this measure with an operational meaning within the quantum error mitigation scenario: it establishes the lower bound of the sampling cost achievable via the quasiprobability decomposition technique. In particular, for parallel quantum noises, we show that global error mitigation has no advantage over local error mitigation.
Xin Wang
Associate Professor
Prof. Xin Wang founded the QuAIR Lab at HKUST (Guangzhou) in June 2023. His research aims to advance our understanding of the limits of information processing with quantum systems and the potential of quantum artificial intelligence. His current interests include quantum algorithms, quantum resource theory, quantum machine learning, quantum computer architecture, and quantum error processing. Prior to establishing the QuAIR Lab, Prof. Wang was a Staff Researcher at the Institute for Quantum Computing at Baidu Research, where he focused on quantum computing research and the development of the Baidu Quantum Platform. Notably, he led the development of Paddle Quantum, a Python library for quantum machine learning. From 2018 to 2019, he was a Hartree Postdoctoral Fellow at the Joint Center for Quantum Information and Computer Science (QuICS) at the University of Maryland, College Park. Prof. Wang received his Ph.D. in quantum information from the University of Technology Sydney in 2018, under the supervision of Prof. Runyao Duan and Prof. Andreas Winter. He obtained his B.S. in mathematics (Wu Yuzhang Honors) from Sichuan University in 2014.