Contraction of ZX diagrams with triangles via stabiliser decompositions

Abstract Recent advances in classical simulation of Clifford+T circuits make use of the ZX calculus to iteratively decompose and simplify magic states into stabiliser terms We improve on this method by studying stabiliser decompositions of ZX diagrams involving the triangle operation. We show that this technique greatly speeds up the simulation of quantum circuits involving multi-controlled gates which can be naturally represented using triangles. We implement our approach in the QuiZX library (2022 A. Kissinger amd J. van de Wetering Quantum Science and Technology 7 , 044001), (2022 A. Kissinger et al F. Le Gall and T. Morimae, ed. 17th Conference on the Theory of Quantum Computation, Communication and Cryptography (TQC 2022), Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs) 232, Schloss Dagstuhl—Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik, Dagstuhl, Germany, pp 5:1–5:13) and demonstrate a significant simulation speed-up (up to multiple orders of magnitude) for random circuits and a variation of previously used benchmarking circuits. Furthermore, we use our software to contract diagrams representing the gradient variance of parametrised quantum circuits, which yields a tool for the automatic numerical detection of the barren plateau phenomenon in ansätze used for quantum machine learning. Compared to traditional statistical approaches, our method yields exact values for gradient variances and only requires contracting a single diagram. The performance of this tool is competitive with tensor network approaches, as demonstrated with benchmarks against the quimb library (2018 J. Gray Journal of Open Source Software 3 , 819).