Improved classical simulation of quantum circuits dominated by Clifford gates

The Gottesman-Knill theorem asserts that a quantum circuit composed of Clifford gates can be efficiently simulated on a classical computer. Here we revisit this theorem and extend it to quantum circuits composed of Clifford and T gates, where T is the single-qubit 45-degree phase shift. We assume that the circuit outputs a bit string x obtained by measuring some subset of w qubits. Two simulation tasks are considered: (1) computing the probability of a given output x, and (2) sampling x from the output probability distribution. It is shown that these tasks can be solved on a classical computer in time $poly(n,m)+2^{0.5 t} t^3$ and $poly(n,m)+2^{0.23 t} t^3 w^3$ respectively, where t is the number of T-gates, m is the total number of gates, and n is the number of qubits. The proposed simulation algorithms may serve as a verification tool for medium-size quantum computations that are dominated by Clifford gates. The main ingredient of both algorithms is a subroutine for approximating the norm of an n-qubit state which is given as a linear combination of $\chi$ stabilizer states. The subroutine runs in time $\chi n^3 \epsilon^{-2}$, where $\epsilon$ is the relative error. We also develop techniques for approximating tensor products of "magic states" by linear combinations of stabilizer states. To demonstrate the power of the new simulation methods, we performed a classical simulation of a hidden shift quantum algorithm with 40 qubits, a few hundred Clifford gates, and nearly 50 T-gates.