Hyper-efficient unitary diamond distance

[owenagnel]

Summary

Adds a new method unitary_diamond_distance to qiskit.quantum_info.operators.measures. This method implements a trick discussed in [1] for calculating the diamond norm (completely bounded trace norm) of a difference of unitary channels (also known as the diamond distance). The implementation is composed of three steps:

• Find the eigenvalues of $U^† V$ where channel1 = $U \cdot U^†$ and channel2 = $V \cdot V^†$
• Find the distance $d$ between origin and convex hull of eigenvalues
• Plug this distance into $2\sqrt{1-d^2}$

Refer to issue https://github.com/Qiskit/qiskit/issues/12341 for more details.

Citations

[1] D. Aharonov, A. Kitaev, and N. Nisan, “Quantum circuits with mixed states,” in Proceedings of the thirtieth annual ACM symposium on Theory of computing, pp. 20–30, 1998.

fixes #12341

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[kevinsung]

Is this ready for review? If not, please convert it to a draft PR.

[owenagnel]

Hi Kevin, I'm pretty happy with it as is. Went through the CONTRIBUTING.md document and hopefully checked off everything. Would be great if someone with more experience contributing could go through it quickly (only a couple changes). All tests and lifting are passing on my machine using tox.

[coveralls]

Pull Request Test Coverage Report for Build 9016815724

Details

• 30 of 34 (88.24%) changed or added relevant lines in 3 files are covered.
• 7 unchanged lines in 2 files lost coverage.
• Overall coverage increased (+0.02%) to 89.648%

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Changes Missing Coverage	Covered Lines	Changed/Added Lines	%
qiskit/quantum_info/operators/measures.py	28	32	87.5%
<!--	Total:	30	34

Files with Coverage Reduction	New Missed Lines	%
qiskit/transpiler/passes/synthesis/unitary_synthesis.py	3	88.02%
crates/qasm2/src/lex.rs	4	92.37%
<!--	Total:	7

Totals
Change from base Build 9004289325:	0.02%
Covered Lines:	62237
Relevant Lines:	69424

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💛 - Coveralls

[owenagnel]

I look forward to seeing the proof of this result.

In general I think it makes more sense to make this function a more general diamond_distance function with a specialized efficient case for two unitary inputs (like we have specialized cases for fidelity and other functions with unitary inputs), and the general case can be a call to the existing diamond_norm function.

Hi Chris! Thanks for the comments, and I completely agree, it makes more sense to generalise the function to all CPTP channels. Regarding the proof, I'm quite happy to send it to you, however, it is part of a dissertation submitted for examination and shouldn't be circulated for the time being. Shall I send it to your IBM email?

I'll make the changes you outlined ASAP.