Constant-depth global shadow estimation
Abstract
Reliable and scalable readout strategies are essential for quantum technologies. As quantum processors grow, extracting useful information must remain feasible without measurement circuits becoming a dominant bottleneck. Randomized measurements and classical shadows provide a powerful route, but global estimation is conventionally associated with highly random ensembles that require increasing circuit depth and hence substantial experimental overhead. In this work, we show that substantially less randomness suffices when the readout is meaningfully adapted to the quantities being estimated. We introduce shallow phase shadows, based on a sparse Clifford-IQP ensemble, and prove efficient global estimation of stabilizer-state fidelities despite the ensemble not forming an approximate relative-error design. On all-to-all architectures, the protocol admits a constant-depth implementation using mid-circuit measurements and classical feedforward, or logarithmic depth without auxiliary systems. The protocol requires only controlled-phase entangling gates and offers a tunable trade-off between circuit resources and estimation accuracy, making it particularly amenable to experimentally relevant architectures with long-range connectivity. Our results show that scalable quantum readout need not reproduce generic randomness: task-adapted randomization can enable substantially shallower global characterization protocols.
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BibTeX
@misc{zhang2026constantdepth,
title = {{Constant-depth global shadow estimation}},
author = {Qingyue Zhang and Zhou You and Dayue Qin and Xiaopeng Li and Jens Eisert and You Zhou},
howpublished = {arXiv},
year = {2026},
month = sep,
doi = {10.48550/arxiv.2609.10408},
eprint = {2609.10408},
archivePrefix = {arXiv},
url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.10408},
note = {CC BY 4.0},
}
RIS
TY - UNPB
TI - Constant-depth global shadow estimation
AU - Qingyue Zhang
AU - Zhou You
AU - Dayue Qin
AU - Xiaopeng Li
AU - Jens Eisert
AU - You Zhou
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/09/09
PB - arXiv
DO - 10.48550/arxiv.2609.10408
UR - https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.10408
AB - Reliable and scalable readout strategies are essential for quantum technologies. As quantum processors grow, extracting useful information must remain feasible without measurement circuits becoming a dominant bottleneck. Randomized measurements and classical shadows provide a powerful route, but global estimation is conventionally associated with highly random ensembles that require increasing circuit depth and hence substantial experimental overhead. In this work, we show that substantially less randomness suffices when the readout is meaningfully adapted to the quantities being estimated. We introduce shallow phase shadows, based on a sparse Clifford-IQP ensemble, and prove efficient global estimation of stabilizer-state fidelities despite the ensemble not forming an approximate relative-error design. On all-to-all architectures, the protocol admits a constant-depth implementation using mid-circuit measurements and classical feedforward, or logarithmic depth without auxiliary systems. The protocol requires only controlled-phase entangling gates and offers a tunable trade-off between circuit resources and estimation accuracy, making it particularly amenable to experimentally relevant architectures with long-range connectivity. Our results show that scalable quantum readout need not reproduce generic randomness: task-adapted randomization can enable substantially shallower global characterization protocols.
ER -