Improved Strong Simulation of Universal Quantum Circuits

Abstract: We find a scaling reduction in the stabilizer rank of the twelve-qubit tensored $T$ gate magic state. This lowers its asymptotic bound to $2^{\sim 0.463 t}$ for multi-Pauli measurements on $t$ magic states, improving over the best previously found bound of $2^{\sim 0.468 t}$. We numerically demonstrate this reduction. This constructively produces the most efficient strong simulation algorithm of the Clifford+$T$ gateset to relative or multiplicative error. We then examine the cost of Pauli measurement in terms of its Gauss sum rank, which is a slight generalization of the stabilizer rank and is a lower bound on its asymptotic scaling. We demonstrate that this lower bound appears to be tight at low $t$-counts, which suggests that the stabilizer rank found at the twelve-qubit state can be lowered further to $2^{\sim 0.449 t}$ and we prove and numerically show that this is the case for single-Pauli measurements. Our construction directly shows how the reduction at $12$ qubits is iteratively based on the reduction obtained at $6$, $3$, $2$, and $1$ qubits. This explains why novel reductions are found at tensor factors for these number of qubit primitives, an explanation lacking previously in the literature. Furthermore, in the process we observe an interesting relationship between the T gate magic state's stabilizer rank and decompositions that are Clifford-isomorphic to a computational sub-basis tensored with single-qubit states that produce minimal unique stabilizer state inner products -- the same relationship that allowed for finding minimal numbers of unique Gauss sums in the odd-dimensional qudit Wigner formulation of Pauli measurements.