Papers for

experimental physicists

Papers whose findings have a practical use for this group, as judged from the abstract. Open a paper to read what it means in practice.

Simulation based method infers quantum system parameters efficiently

Simulation-Based Quantum System Inference with Neural Posterior Estimation

Abstract: Models of quantum systems faithfully map system parameters to observations, but the inverse problem of parameter inference from measurement data presents a fundamental challenge: computationally intractable likelihoods due to an exponentially large Hilbert space. Here, we introduce simulation-based quantum system inference, a unified, likelihood-free framework that learns parameter posteriors directly from classical simulation data. The central idea is to pair polynomial-cost classical simulators, such as Pauli propagation and tensor networks, with normalizing flows or other neural density estimators for accurate, reusable inference. A single model, trained once, maps any new measurement record to its posterior in one forward pass---turning per-experiment inference into a fixed, up-front cost. We numerically demonstrate the framework's versatility across Pauli noise learning, quantum error mitigation, quantum state tomography, and Hamiltonian learning, with examples involving 81-qubit shallow circuits and 735-parameter inference. In each case, the approach yields accurate estimates of identifiable parameters, while posterior uncertainty provides additional diagnostics of non-identifiability and indicates where further characterization is needed. Our framework reduces data-acquisition requirements in quantum experiments and accelerates parameter inference, providing a practical route to characterizing and improving large-scale quantum systems.

Mon 28 SeptMachine Learning
The gist
Understanding the inner details of quantum systems from what we can measure is very hard because the math gets extremely complex. The authors present a new way to learn about these details by training a machine learning model on simulated quantum data. Once trained, this model can quickly estimate the likely values of the system's parameters from new measurements, without needing heavy computations each time. This method works for various quantum tasks and helps scientists characterize large quantum systems more easily and with less data.
Open → 2609.34995v1