Dual-unitary shadow tomography

Quantum 9, 1816 (2025).

https://doi.org/10.22331/q-2025-07-29-1816

We introduce “dual-unitary shadow tomography” (DUST), a classical shadow tomography protocol based on dual-unitary brick-wall circuits. To quantify the performance of DUST, we study operator spreading and Pauli weight dynamics in one-dimensional qubit systems, evolved by random two-local dual-unitary gates arranged in a brick-wall structure, ending with a measurement layer. We do this by deriving general constraints on the Pauli weight transfer matrix and specializing to the case of dual-unitarity. Remarkably, we find that operator spreading in these circuits have a rich structure resembling that of relativistic quantum field theories, with massless chiral excitations that can decay or fuse into each other, which we call left- or right-movers. We develop a mean-field description of the Pauli weight in terms of $rho(x,t)$, which represents the probability of having nontrivial support at site $x$ and depth $t$ starting from a fixed weight distribution. We develop an equation of state for $rho(x,t)$ and simulate it numerically using Monte Carlo simulations. For the task of predicting operators with (nearly) full support, we show that DUST outperforms brick-wall Clifford shadows of equal depth. This advantage is further pronounced for small system sizes and our results are generally robust to finite-size effects.