
Suppose we want to upper bound the quantum fidelity. In that case, we can consider the measurement success
probability,i.e. , the overall probability of sampling non-zero amplitude states when measuring in the computational
Z-basis:
MSP(ρψ, ρ) := Xx∈{0,1}n,⟨x|ρψ|x⟩̸=0 ⟨x|ρ|x⟩(2)
Another upper bound measure is Hellinger Fidelity, which quantifies the similarity between the probability distri-
butions of the pure target state and the measurement probabilities in the computational Z-basis:
H(ρψ, ρ) :=
X
x∈{0,1}Nq⟨x|ρψ|x⟩·⟨x|ρ|x⟩
2
(3)
Using a double application of the Cauchy-Schwarz inequality, one gets F(ρψ, ρ)≤H(ρψ, ρ)≤MSP(ρψ, ρ) [3].
Several works have shown that it is possible to estimate a lower bound on the quantum fidelity using only a
few measurement settings, avoiding full-state tomography. Earlier works [17, 31] focused on certain states with
unique symmetry that require only a small random subset of Pauli operators to estimate fidelity. Somma et al. [31]
proposed expressions for estimating quantum fidelity for highly symmetric classes of multi-qubit state preparation,
i.e., rotational invariant states, stabilizer states, and generalized coherent states. To estimate the lower fidelity
bound, they only used the measurements related to the symmetry operators of the density matrix. Guhne et
al. [17] derived fidelity estimation for GHZ and Wstates using 2N−1 measurements. Flammia et al. [15] had
a generalized approach where they showed estimation techniques for all possible state preparation by measuring
fewer Pauli operators close to the desired state and of greater importance. Mentioning the scalability issue in
generalized Nqubit state fidelity estimation, Elben et al. [14] showed how randomized measurement could enable
fidelity estimation by comparing two states. Zhang et al. [39] proposed a machine learning (ML) approach for direct
fidelity estimation as a classification problem using a constant number of expectations. Recently, a classical shadow
approach has been introduced to enhance tomography efficiency, with potential benefits for fidelity estimation for
certain quantum states [19, 33].
Additionally, quantum state verification (also known as the non-tomographic method) uses advanced statistical
approaches to verify whether the output of some device is the target state. Previous works on quantum state
verification techniques validate specific state preparation such as Dicke states [25], GHZ states [24], Hypergraph
states [40], Pure states [23, 35, 36, 41], etc. There are also some generalized approaches for state verification [21, 28,
34,38,42, 43]. Furthermore, Yu et al. [37] utilizes advanced statistical methods for resource-efficient quantum state
verification.
3 Methodology
In this work, we run the experiments on both the hardware and emulator devices of Quantinuum H-systems [1]
using the Quantinuum Python API. Running jobs on the Quantinuum backend requires H-System Quantum Credits
(HQC) that are linear with both the number of shots per circuit and the number of CNOTs in the circuit. The
total cost generally scales with the product of the number of shots and CNOT counts. Our initial goal was to
determine the number of experiments and the number of shots for different state preparations permissible within
the HQCs allocated to us. As the Quantinuum machines are available through a calendar month and HQCs are
allocated monthly, we target to complete experiments throughout several months with available hardware credits.
First, we run the experiments on the Quantinuum H1-2E emulator to estimate the confidence interval sizes we
can expect from the quantum hardware. To see the effect of the number of samples/circuit executions, we compute
the cumulative bounds for fidelity and measurement success probability. Similarly, we compute a two-sided 68%
confidence interval below and above the estimator for the mean based on Student’s t-distribution to check the
bounds’ stability with an increasing number of shots. Analyzing the results of emulator experiments, we get an
approximation of a meaningful number of experiments that can be performed on quantum hardware for various
states, improving on the (polynomial) number of samples derived from theoretical considerations (as elaborated on
later). We limit Dicke state preparation up to N= 10 as Dicke States starting at N= 11 become prohibitively
expensive computationally. For GHZ states, we go up to N= 20 as we run the experiment on a 20-qubit H1-1
4