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Improved simulation of stabilizer circuits

6 Pith papers cite this work. Polarity classification is still indexing.

6 Pith papers citing it
abstract

The Gottesman-Knill theorem says that a stabilizer circuit -- that is, a quantum circuit consisting solely of CNOT, Hadamard, and phase gates -- can be simulated efficiently on a classical computer. This paper improves that theorem in several directions. First, by removing the need for Gaussian elimination, we make the simulation algorithm much faster at the cost of a factor-2 increase in the number of bits needed to represent a state. We have implemented the improved algorithm in a freely-available program called CHP (CNOT-Hadamard-Phase), which can handle thousands of qubits easily. Second, we show that the problem of simulating stabilizer circuits is complete for the classical complexity class ParityL, which means that stabilizer circuits are probably not even universal for classical computation. Third, we give efficient algorithms for computing the inner product between two stabilizer states, putting any n-qubit stabilizer circuit into a "canonical form" that requires at most O(n^2/log n) gates, and other useful tasks. Fourth, we extend our simulation algorithm to circuits acting on mixed states, circuits containing a limited number of non-stabilizer gates, and circuits acting on general tensor-product initial states but containing only a limited number of measurements.

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representative citing papers

Clifft: Fast Exact Simulation of Near-Clifford Quantum Circuits

quant-ph · 2026-04-29 · unverdicted · novelty 7.0 · 2 refs

Clifft introduces a factored-state simulator that shifts exponential cost to a dynamic active subspace, generalizing Stim's compile-once model to near-Clifford circuits and enabling the first exact end-to-end simulations of magic-state cultivation over hundreds of billions of shots.

Clifford Orbits from Cayley Graph Quotients

quant-ph · 2023-06-01 · unverdicted · novelty 6.0

Quotienting the Cayley graph of the Clifford group by a quantum state's stabilizer subgroup produces a graph of the state's Clifford orbit.

Complexity of Quadratic Quantum Chaos

hep-th · 2025-09-04 · unverdicted · novelty 5.0

Hard-core boson two-body models with random interactions exhibit chaotic spectral statistics, operator growth, and eigenstate properties approaching those of random matrices and the SYK model.

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