Resource-efficient verification of quantum computing using Serfling’s bound

Abstract

Verifying quantum states is central to certifying the correct operation of various quantum information processing tasks. In particular, in measurement-based quantum computing, checking whether correct graph states are generated is essential for reliable quantum computing. Several verification protocols for graph states have been proposed, but none of these are particularly resource efficient: multiple copies are required to extract a single state that is guaranteed to be close to the ideal one. The best protocol currently known requires O(n15) copies of the state, where n is the size of the graph state. In this paper, we construct a significantly more resource-efficient verification protocol for graph states that only requires O(n5 log n) copies. The key idea is to employ Serfling’s bound, which is a probability inequality in classical statistics. Utilizing Serfling’s bound also enables us to generalize our protocol for qudit and continuous-variable graph states. Constructing a resource-efficient verification protocol for them is non-trivial. For example, the previous verification protocols for qubit graph states that use the quantum de Finetti theorem cannot be generalized to qudit and continuous-variable graph states without tremendously increasing the resource overhead. This is because the overhead caused by the quantum de Finetti theorem depends on the local dimension. On the other hand, in our protocol, the resource overhead is independent of the local dimension, and therefore generalizing to qudit or continuous-variable graph states does not increase the overhead. The flexibility of Serfling’s bound also makes our protocol robust: our protocol accepts slightly noisy but still useful graph states.