Sampling quantum states with inequality constraints

Abstract

Random samples of quantum states with specific properties are useful for various applications, such as Monte Carlo integration over the state space. In the high-dimensional situations that one encounters already for a few qubits, the quantum state space has a very complicated boundary, and it is challenging to incorporate the specific properties into the sampling algorithm. In this paper, we present the Sequentially Constrained Monte Carlo (SCMC) algorithm as a powerful and versatile method for sampling quantum states in accordance with any desired properties that can be stated as inequalities. We apply the SCMC algorithm to the generation of samples of bound entangled states; for example, we obtain nearly ten thousand bound entangled two-qutrit states in a few minutes -- a colossal speed-up over independence sampling, which yields less than ten such states per day. In the second application, we draw samples of high-dimensional quantum states from a narrowly peaked target distribution and observe that SCMC sampling remains efficient as the dimension grows. In yet another application, the SCMC algorithm produces uniformly distributed quantum states in regions bounded by values of the problem-specific target distribution; such samples are needed when estimating parameters from the probabilistic data acquired in quantum experiments.