A Single Fixed Shallow Circuit for Classical Shadows of Arbitrary n-Qubit States

Abstract

Classical shadows extract quantum properties from reusable classical records, typically obtained through randomized measurement settings. Although individual settings may be shallow, switching among them introduces control, calibration, and reconfiguration costs beyond conventional metrics. Here we construct, for every $n$, a single fixed shallow quantum analyzer whose Born outcomes replace externally sampled settings as labels for reusable shadow snapshots. The analyzer combines a freshly prepared $n$-qubit fiducial register $A$ with parallel Bell readout of $A$ and the unknown system $S$, producing one $2n$-bit record per copy. The same circuit realizes a rank-one minimal informationally complete measurement: one fixed setting replaces the $3^n$ local-Pauli settings conventionally used for complete reconstruction while retaining the minimum $d^2$ outcomes with $d=2^n$. Its Pauli-diagonal frame admits an analytic inverse. For fixed Hermitian observables, the Haar-averaged conditional variance has a dimension-independent coefficient, whereas the state-uniform coefficient is dimension dependent. For $n\ge3$, worst-state Pauli variances remain bounded in the axial sector and scale as $Θ(d)$ in the mixed sector. Fiducial preparation before system contact uses $n-1$ arbitrary two-qubit gates, no work qubits beyond $A$, and logarithmic depth under all-to-all connectivity. The unknown system undergoes one parallel system-ancilla entangling layer followed by local Hadamards and readout. Measurement-assisted preparation achieves $O(1)$ adaptive quantum depth using $n+1$ extra qubits in the heralded route, or $O(n\log n)$ auxiliaries for deterministic completion. These tradeoffs show that part of the measurement-setting randomness and control complexity normally supplied shot by shot can instead be compiled into a fixed reusable analyzer.