Quantum memory assisted observable estimation

Abstract

The estimation of many-qubit observables is an essential task of quantum information processing. The generally applicable approach is to decompose the observables into weighted sums of multi-qubit Pauli strings, i.e., tensor products of single-qubit Pauli matrices, which can readily be measured with low-depth Clifford circuits. The accumulation of shot noise in this approach, however, severely limits the achievable variance for a finite number of measurements. We introduce a novel method, dubbed $\textit{coherent Pauli summation}$ (CPS), that circumvents this limitation by exploiting access to a single-qubit quantum memory in which measurement information can be stored and accumulated. CPS offers a reduction in the required number of measurements for a given variance that scales linearly with the number of Pauli strings in the decomposed observable. Our work demonstrates how a single long-coherence qubit memory can assist the operation of many-qubit quantum devices in a cardinal task.