Shadow tomography with noisy readouts

Abstract: Shadow tomography is a scalable technique to characterise the quantum state of a quantum computer or quantum simulator. The protocol is based on the transformation of the outcomes of random measurements into the so-called classical shadows, which can later be transformed into samples of expectation values of the observables of interest. By construction, classical shadows are intrinsically sensitive to readout noise. In fact, the complicated structure of the readout noise due to crosstalk appears to be detrimental to its scalability. We show that classical shadows accept much more flexible constructions beyond the standard ones, which can eventually be made more conformable with readout noise. With this construction, we show that readout errors in classical shadows can be efficiently mitigated by randomly flipping the qubit before, and the classical outcome bit after the measurement, referred to as $X$-twirling. That a single $X$-gate is sufficient for mitigating readout noise for classical shadows is in contrast to Clifford-twirling, where the implementation of random Clifford gates is required.