Fermionic Partial Tomography via Classical Shadows

We propose a tomographic protocol for estimating any k-body reduced density matrix (k-RDM) of an n-mode fermionic state, a ubiquitous step in near-term quantum algorithms for simulating many-body physics, chemistry, and materials. Our approach extends the framework of classical shadows, a randomized approach to learning a collection of quantum-state properties, to the fermionic setting. Our sampling protocol uses randomized measurement settings generated by a discrete group of fermionic Gaussian unitaries, implementable with linear-depth circuits. We prove that estimating all k -RDM elements to additive precision ϵ requires on the order of (nk)k3/2 log (n)/ϵ2 repeated state preparations, which is optimal up to the logarithmic factor. Furthermore, numerical calculations show that our protocol offers a substantial improvement in constant overheads for k ≥ 2 , as compared to prior deterministic strategies. We also adapt our method to particle-number symmetry, wherein the additional circuit depth may be halved at the cost of roughly 2–5 times more repetitions.