Optimal strategies for estimating the average fidelity of quantum gates.

We show that the minimum experimental effort to estimate the average error of a quantum gate scales as 2(n) for n qubits and requires classical computational resources ∼n(2)2(3n) when no specific assumptions on the gate can be made. This represents a reduction by 2(n) compared to the best currently available protocol, Monte Carlo characterization. The reduction comes at the price of either having to prepare entangled input states or obtaining bounds rather than the average fidelity itself.

Modular entanglement.

We introduce and discuss the concept of modular entanglement. This is the entanglement that is established between the end points of modular systems composed by sets of interacting moduli of arbitrarily fixed size. We show that end-to-end modular entanglement scales in the thermodynamic limit and rapidly saturates with the number of constituent moduli.