The Pauli Lightcone: Information-Theoretic Error Mitigation Beyond the Autocorrelation
Abstract
We introduce the wavemap: a spatial portrait of noise effects that assigns each site a per-noise-level arrival delay l_γ(v) and cross-entropy loss L_γ(v). These observables are exact at the lightcone frontier, where bond dimension χis small and the simulation is most faithful. Eigenvalue analysis of the composed gate-plus-noise Pauli transfer matrices confirms that the studied noise is pure amplitude damping: the spatial propagation pattern is entirely determined by the gate, making the wavemap a model-free noise diagnostic. We apply the multi-product formula (MPF) to recover the noiseless Pauli weight field from the noisy samples, subject to the Lieb-Robinson causal constraint nMPF <= nnl . Fitting time-adaptive coefficients α(t) over the frontier recovers up to 55% of the information loss relative to the best noisy sample, exploiting the fact that the frontier is where truncation error is smallest. On an IBM heavy-hex lattice with heterogeneous hardware noise the method identifies an information-starved regime, pointing to calibrated synthetic noise as the next required experiment.
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BibTeX
@misc{dalberto2026pauli,
title = {{The Pauli Lightcone: Information-Theoretic Error Mitigation Beyond the Autocorrelation}},
author = {Paolo D'Alberto},
howpublished = {arXiv},
year = {2026},
month = sep,
doi = {10.48550/arxiv.2608.25254},
eprint = {2608.25254},
archivePrefix = {arXiv},
url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.25254},
note = {CC BY 4.0},
}
RIS
TY - UNPB
TI - The Pauli Lightcone: Information-Theoretic Error Mitigation Beyond the Autocorrelation
AU - Paolo D'Alberto
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/09/19
PB - arXiv
DO - 10.48550/arxiv.2608.25254
UR - https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.25254
AB - We introduce the wavemap: a spatial portrait of noise effects that assigns each site a per-noise-level arrival delay l_γ(v) and cross-entropy loss L_γ(v). These observables are exact at the lightcone frontier, where bond dimension χis small and the simulation is most faithful. Eigenvalue analysis of the composed gate-plus-noise Pauli transfer matrices confirms that the studied noise is pure amplitude damping: the spatial propagation pattern is entirely determined by the gate, making the wavemap a model-free noise diagnostic. We apply the multi-product formula (MPF) to recover the noiseless Pauli weight field from the noisy samples, subject to the Lieb-Robinson causal constraint nMPF <= nnl . Fitting time-adaptive coefficients α(t) over the frontier recovers up to 55% of the information loss relative to the best noisy sample, exploiting the fact that the frontier is where truncation error is smallest. On an IBM heavy-hex lattice with heterogeneous hardware noise the method identifies an information-starved regime, pointing to calibrated synthetic noise as the next required experiment.
ER -