arXiv subjects

Aaron Sander

Publications and source records attributed to Aaron Sander.

14 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Shuttling-aware dynamical decoupling for quantum charge-coupled devices

Dynamical decoupling (DD) helps maintain high-fidelity quantum computations by suppressing dephasing noise through carefully timed refocusing pulses. In quantum charge-coupled device (QCCD) architectures, however, where ions are shuttled throughout the device, transport constrains when pulses can be applied and affects the phase accumulated by an ion. Conventional DD methods do not account for shuttling and may therefore schedule pulses that must be omitted or shifted after transport scheduling, weakening the protection from dephasing. We therefore introduce shuttling-aware dynamical decoupling (SADD), an offline compiler pass that jointly selects refocusing pulses and local ion rerouting while preserving logical-gate timings and the total schedule length. In benchmark simulations, SADD improves average final-state fidelity over both the original schedules and a simple nearest-feasible Hahn-echo baseline when dephasing dominates control and transport errors and varies slowly enough for DD. Rerouting enables otherwise infeasible pulse timings, while spatial information about the noise can provide further gains. These benefits disappear, however, when the added transport introduces too much error. Overall, our results show that coordinating DD with ion transport is an effective compiler strategy for reducing dephasing in QCCD processors.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2026

Scalable Lindblad Noise Learning via Stochastic Tensor-Network Simulation

Learning dissipation rates in large-scale open quantum systems is a major obstacle for near-term quantum technologies, as existing Lindblad estimation methods are typically limited to small system sizes due to the computational complexity of repeatedly solving the Lindblad equation during optimization. Here, we propose a scalable noise-learning framework for Lindblad dissipation rates that combines a stochastic simulation method, the Tensor Jump Method (TJM), with gradient-free optimization of a least-squares cost-function defined on time series of local-observable expectation values. We demonstrate the approach on two noise models in the Ising model: a site-resolved (local) model, in which independent dissipation rates are learned for each site up to $N_{\mathrm{site}}=16$, and a spatially homogeneous (global) model with only seven parameters, scaled to $N_{\mathrm{site}}=160$ sites.We complement these numerical results with a series of exact, provable guarantees: the Frobenius variance of the TJM density-matrix estimator is shown to equal $(1-\mathrm{Tr}[\rho^2])/N_{\mathrm{traj}}$, an exact purity-based characterization of the stochastic estimation error; the corresponding purity evolution is proven to be monotonically non-increasing for Hermitian jump operators; and, under a finite covariance distance assumption, the standard deviation of the cost-function is shown to decrease with system size, so that fewer trajectories are needed to reach a fixed target accuracy as the system grows. Together, this combination of scalable numerics and rigorous theoretical guarantees positions TJM-based noise learning as a practical foundation for characterizing dissipation in large quantum devices and for guiding future work on error mitigation and quantum error correction.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2026

Basis-update and Galerkin time integration in canonical matrix-product-state form

Matrix product state algorithms must enlarge their bond spaces as entanglement grows and compress them to control cost. We formulate basis-update and Galerkin (BUG) time integration as a sequence of canonical MPS sweeps for Hamiltonians represented as matrix product operators. We show when two natural basis updates produce the same trial space and when transporting coefficients between successive bases preserves the represented state. Under these conditions, the existing first-order error bound for uncompressed tree-tensor-network BUG also applies to the alternating-endpoint MPS schedule. We verify the uncompressed implementation against an independent six-site calculation. We then compare BUG with two-site TDVP for 16-site transverse-field Ising and Haldane-Shastry dynamics. At matched timestep and truncation settings, BUG performs fewer local exponential actions and has lower runtime. These settings do not produce equal accuracy. The runtime versus accuracy curves cross for the Ising model and are close for the Haldane-Shastry model. The comparison therefore identifies model-dependent trade-offs rather than a general advantage for either method.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2026

Noisy quantum circuit simulation with the tensor jump method

Classical simulation of noisy quantum circuits is essential for validating algorithms, benchmarking hardware, and assessing error-mitigation strategies, but remains limited by the exponential cost of density-matrix methods and the high variance of standard trajectory sampling. We introduce a variance-aware tensor network framework that combines the tensor jump method with local TDVP gate evolution on matrix product states and sparse Pauli-Lindblad hardware noise models. Gates are applied as short variational evolutions on the MPS manifold, while noise is sampled per circuit window from Pauli-Lindblad jump sets with state-independent hazards and dissipative contractions that reduce to irrelevant global factors after renormalization. The method supports correlated multi-qubit Lindblad noise consistent with hardware connectivity, including long-range operators on non-adjacent qubits, enabling direct simulation of crosstalk and other connectivity-induced errors beyond local noise models. We develop two unbiased variance-aware unravelings. An analog unitary-mixture unraveling matches the Lindblad generator exactly under symmetric Gaussian or two-point angle laws, while a projector-jump unraveling yields state-independent hazards and closed-form variance laws. Both retain the standard 1/sqrt(N) Monte Carlo convergence but with reduced prefactors. Empirically, projector sampling strongly reduces trajectory variance and bond-dimension growth across many circuit architectures, whereas analog sampling is most effective at weak noise. We demonstrate accurate, scalable noisy-circuit simulation on a 25-qubit noisy XY quench and IBM's 127-qubit kicked-Ising benchmark with long-range depolarizing noise, achieving reduced Monte Carlo variance and favorable MPS bond-dimension growth compared with standard Kraus-insertion baselines.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2026

Computational regimes in matrix-product-state-based quantum trajectory simulations

Efficient simulation of open quantum systems is central to modeling noisy quantum hardware and many-body dynamics. In trajectory-based tensor network methods, cost is often associated with trajectory-level quantities such as entanglement growth or bond dimension. However, the total cost of a fixed-accuracy simulation also depends on statistical sampling, and the interplay between per-trajectory complexity and sampling effort remains poorly understood. Here we introduce a cost-resolved framework for matrix product state (MPS)-based quantum trajectory simulations that decomposes total cost into memory per trajectory, runtime per trajectory, and sampling effort. We show that physically equivalent stochastic unravelings of the same Lindblad dynamics do not necessarily reduce total cost, but instead redistribute cost between trajectory complexity and statistical convergence. This trade-off is quantified by two dimensionless inflation factors: a bond dimension inflation $\alpha$ and a sampling inflation $\kappa$, which together determine the preferred unraveling under hardware-dependent memory and parallelism constraints. We provide a practical protocol for extracting $(\alpha,\kappa)$ from modest pilot simulations and demonstrate it using benchmarks across multiple noise channels. The resulting decision maps show that the computationally favorable unraveling can change with noise strength, time-step resolution, system size, and available parallelism. These results establish unraveling choice as a hardware-aware simulation design problem rather than an intrinsic optimization of trajectory entanglement alone.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2025

Quantum circuit simulation with a local time-dependent variational principle

Classical simulations of quantum circuits are vital for assessing potential quantum advantage and benchmarking devices, yet they require sophisticated methods to avoid the exponential growth of resources. Tensor network approaches, in particular matrix product states (MPS) combined with the time-evolving block decimation (TEBD) algorithm, currently dominate large-scale circuit simulations. These methods scale efficiently when entanglement is limited but suffer rapid bond dimension growth with increasing entanglement and handle long-range gates via costly SWAP insertions. Motivated by the success of the time-dependent variational principle (TDVP) in many-body physics, we reinterpret quantum circuits as a series of discrete time evolutions, using gate generators to construct an MPS-based circuit simulation via a local TDVP formulation. This addresses TEBD's key limitations by (1) naturally accommodating long-range gates and (2) optimally representing states on the MPS manifold. By diffusing entanglement more globally, the method suppresses local bond growth and reduces memory and runtime costs. We benchmark the approach on five 49-qubit circuits: three Hamiltonian circuits (1D open and periodic Heisenberg, 2D 7x7 Ising) and two algorithmic ones (quantum approximate optimization, hardware-efficient ansatz). Across all cases, our method yields substantial resource reductions over standard tools, establishing a new state-of-the-art for circuit simulation and enabling advances across quantum computing, condensed matter, and beyond.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2025

Quantum Entrepreneurship Lab: Training a Future Workforce for the Quantum Industry

The Quantum Entrepreneurship Lab (QEL) is a one-semester, project-based course at the Technical University of Munich (TUM), designed to bridge the gap between academic research and industrial application in the quantum sector. As part of the Munich Quantum Valley (MQV) ecosystem, the course fosters interdisciplinary collaboration between technical and business students, equipping them with the skills necessary to contribute to or lead in the emerging quantum industry. The QEL curriculum integrates two complementary tracks. First, technical students form teams where they engage in cutting-edge, industry-relevant research topics under academic supervision. Meanwhile business students in a parallel course explore commercialization strategies, risks, and opportunities within the quantum technology landscape. Midway through the semester, a selection of the business students join the technical course to form interdisciplinary teams which assess the feasibility of transforming scientific concepts into viable business solutions. The course culminates in three key deliverables: a publication-style technical report, a white paper analyzing the business potential and financial requirements, and a startup pitch presented to the quantum community at a Demo Day. This work outlines the course structure, objectives, and outcomes, providing a model for other institutions seeking to cultivate a highly skilled, innovation-driven workforce in quantum science and technology.

physics.ed-ph↗

arXiv2025

Large-scale stochastic simulation of open quantum systems

Understanding the precise interaction mechanisms between quantum systems and their environment is crucial for advancing stable quantum technologies, designing reliable experimental frameworks, and building accurate models of real-world phenomena. However, simulating open quantum systems, which feature complex non-unitary dynamics, poses significant computational challenges that require innovative methods to overcome. In this work, we introduce the tensor jump method (TJM), a scalable, embarrassingly parallel algorithm for stochastically simulating large-scale open quantum systems, specifically Markovian dynamics captured by Lindbladians. This method is built on three core principles where, in particular, we extend the Monte Carlo wave function (MCWF) method to matrix product states, use a dynamic time-dependent variational principle (TDVP) to significantly reduce errors during time evolution, and introduce what we call a sampling MPS to drastically reduce the dependence on the simulation's time step size. We demonstrate that this method scales more effectively than previous methods and ensures convergence to the Lindbladian solution independent of system size, which we show both rigorously and numerically. Finally, we provide evidence of its utility by simulating Lindbladian dynamics of XXX Heisenberg models up to a thousand spins using a consumer-grade CPU. This work represents a significant step forward in the simulation of large-scale open quantum systems, with the potential to enable discoveries across various domains of quantum physics, particularly those where the environment plays a fundamental role, and to both dequantize and facilitate the development of more stable quantum hardware.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2024

Predicting interacting Green's functions with neural networks

Strongly correlated materials exhibit complex electronic phenomena that are challenging to capture with traditional theoretical methods, yet understanding these systems is crucial for discovering new quantum materials. Addressing the computational bottlenecks in studying such systems, we present a proof-of-concept machine learning-based approach to accelerate Dynamical Mean Field Theory (DMFT) calculations. Our method predicts interacting Green's functions on arbitrary two-dimensional lattices using a two-step ML framework. First, an autoencoder-based network learns and generates physically plausible band structures of materials, providing diverse training data. Next, a dense neural network predicts interacting Green's functions of these physically-possible band structures, expressed in the basis of Legendre polynomials. We demonstrate that this architecture can serve as a substitute for the computationally demanding quantum impurity solver in DMFT, significantly reducing computational cost while maintaining accuracy. This approach offers a scalable pathway to accelerate simulations of strongly correlated systems and lays the groundwork for future extensions to multi-band systems.

cond-mat.str-el↗

arXiv2024

Equivalence checking of quantum circuits via intermediary matrix product operator

As quantum computing advances, the complexity of quantum circuits is rapidly increasing, driving the need for robust methods to aid in their design. Equivalence checking plays a vital role in identifying errors that may arise during compilation and optimization of these circuits and is a critical step in quantum circuit verification. In this work, we introduce a novel method based on Matrix Product Operators (MPOs) for determining the equivalence of quantum circuits. Our approach contracts tensorized quantum gates from two circuits into an intermediary MPO, exploiting their reversibility to determine their equivalence or non-equivalence. Our results show that this method offers significant scalability improvements over existing methods, with polynomial scaling in circuit width and depth for the practical use cases we explore. We expect that this work sets the new standard for scalable equivalence checking of quantum circuits and will become a crucial tool for the validation of increasingly complex quantum systems.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2024

Stripping Quantum Decision Diagrams of their Identity

Classical representations of quantum states and operations as vectors and matrices are plagued by an exponential growth in memory and runtime requirements for increasing system sizes. Based on their use in classical computing, an alternative data structure known as Decision Diagrams (DDs) has been proposed, which, in many cases, provides both a more compact representation and more efficient computation. In the classical realm, decades of research have been conducted on DDs and numerous variations tailored for specific applications exist. However, DDs for quantum computing are just in their infancy and there is still room for tailoring them to this new technology. In particular, existing representations of DDs require extending all operations in a quantum circuit to the full system size through extension by nodes representing identity matrices. In this work, we make an important step forward for quantum DDs by stripping these identity structures from quantum operations. This significantly reduces the number of nodes required to represent them as well as eases the pressure on key building blocks of their implementation. As a result, we obtain a structure that is more natural for quantum computing and significantly speeds up with computations-with a runtime improvement of up to 70x compared to the state-of-the-art.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2024

The MQT Handbook: A Summary of Design Automation Tools and Software for Quantum Computing

Quantum computers are becoming a reality and numerous quantum computing applications with a near-term perspective (e.g., for finance, chemistry, machine learning, and optimization) and with a long-term perspective (e.g., for cryptography or unstructured search) are currently being investigated. However, designing and realizing potential applications for these devices in a scalable fashion requires automated, efficient, and user-friendly software tools that cater to the needs of end users, engineers, and physicists at every level of the entire quantum software stack. Many of the problems to be tackled in that regard are similar to design problems from the classical realm for which sophisticated design automation tools have been developed in the previous decades. The Munich Quantum Toolkit (MQT) is a collection of software tools for quantum computing developed by the Chair for Design Automation at the Technical University of Munich which explicitly utilizes this design automation expertise. Our overarching objective is to provide solutions for design tasks across the entire quantum software stack. This entails high-level support for end users in realizing their applications, efficient methods for the classical simulation, compilation, and verification of quantum circuits, tools for quantum error correction, support for physical design, and more. These methods are supported by corresponding data structures (such as decision diagrams) and core methods (such as SAT encodings/solvers). All of the developed tools are available as open-source implementations and are hosted on https://github.com/cda-tum.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2023

Towards Hamiltonian Simulation with Decision Diagrams

This paper proposes a novel approach to Hamiltonian simulation using Decision Diagrams (DDs), which are an exact representation based on exploiting redundancies in representations of quantum states and operations. While the simulation of Hamiltonians has been studied extensively, scaling these simulations to larger or more complex systems is often challenging and may require approximations or new simulation methods altogether. DDs offer such an alternative that has not yet been applied to Hamiltonian simulation. In this work, we investigate the behavior of DDs for this task. To this end, we review the basics of DDs such as their construction and present how the relevant operations for Hamiltonian simulation are implemented in this data structure -- leading to the first DD-based Hamiltonian simulation approach. Based on several series of evaluations and comparisons, we then discuss insights about the performance of this complementary approach. Overall, these studies show that DDs indeed may offer a promising new data structure which, for certain examples, can provide orders of magnitudes of improvement compared to the state-of-the-art, yet also comes with its own, fundamentally different, limitations.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2016

Reflectance dependence of polytetrafluoroethylene on thickness for xenon scintillation light

Many rare event searches including dark matter direct detection and neutrinoless double beta decay experiments take advantage of the high VUV reflective surfaces made from polytetrafluoroethylene (PTFE) reflector materials to achieve high light collection efficiency in their detectors. As the detectors have grown in size over the past decade, there has also been an increased need for ever thinner detector walls without significant loss in reflectance to reduce dead volumes around active noble liquids, outgassing, and potential backgrounds. We report on the experimental results to measure the dependence of the reflectance on thickness of two PTFE samples at wavelengths near 178 nm. No change in reflectance was observed as the thickness of a cylindrically shaped PTFE vessel immersed in liquid xenon was varied between 1 mm and 9.5 mm.

physics.ins-det↗