Heisenberg-Limited Adaptive Gradient Estimation for Multiple Observables

Abstract

In quantum mechanics, measuring the expectation value of a general observable has an inherent statistical uncertainty that is quantified by variance or mean squared error of measurement outcome. While the uncertainty can be reduced by averaging several samples, the number of samples should be minimized when each sample is very costly. This is especially the case for fault-tolerant quantum computing that involves measurement of multiple observables of nontrivial states in large quantum systems that exceed the capabilities of classical computers. In this work, we provide an adaptive quantum algorithm for estimating the expectation values of M general observables within root mean squared error ε simultaneously, using O(ε−1MlogM) queries to a state preparation oracle of a target state. This remarkably achieves the scaling of Heisenberg limit 1/ε, a fundamental bound on the estimation precision in terms of mean squared error, together with the sublinear scaling of the number of observables M. The proposed method is an adaptive version of the quantum gradient-estimation algorithm and has a resource-efficient implementation due to its adaptiveness. Specifically, the space overhead in the proposed method is O(M), which is independent from the estimation precision ε unlike noniterative algorithms. In addition, our method can avoid the numerical instability problem for constructing quantum circuits in a large-scale task (e.g., ε≪1 in our case), which appears in the actual implementation of many algorithms relying on quantum signal processing techniques. Our method paves a new way to precisely understand and predict various physical properties in complicated quantum systems using quantum computers. Published by the American Physical Society 2025