Channel Expressivity Measures

Abstract

The dynamics of closed quantum systems undergoing unitary processes has been well studied, leading to notions of measures for the expressive power of parameterized quantum circuits, relative to the unique, maximally expressive, average behaviour of ensembles of unitaries. Such unitary expressivity measures have further been linked to concentration phenomena known as barren plateaus. However, existing quantum hardware are not isolated from their noisy environment, and such non-unitary dynamics must therefore be described by more general trace-preserving operations. To account for hardware noise, we propose several, non-unique measures of expressivity for quantum channels and study their properties, highlighting how average non-unitary channels differ from average unitary channels. In the limit of large composite system and environments, average noisy quantum channels are shown to be maximally globally depolarizing, with next-leading-order non-unital perturbative behaviour. Furthermore, we rigorously prove that highly-expressive parameterized quantum channels will suffer from barren plateaus, thus generalizing explanations of noise-induced phenomena. This work is based on forthcoming work with Diego Martin, Zoe Holmes, and Marco Cerezo, in affiliation with Los Alamos National Laboratory.