Classical shadows based on locally-entangled measurements

We study classical shadows protocols based on randomized measurements in $n$-qubit entangled bases, generalizing the random Pauli measurement protocol ($n=1$). We show that entangled measurements ($n\ge 2$) enable nontrivial and potentially advantageous trade-offs in the sample complexity of learning Pauli expectation values. This is sharply illustrated by shadows based on two-qubit Bell measurements: the scaling of sample complexity with Pauli weight $k$ improves quadratically (from $\sim 3^k$ down to $\sim 3^{k\mathrm{/}2}$) for many operators, while others become impossible to learn. Tuning the amount of entanglement in the measurement bases defines a family of protocols that interpolate between Pauli and Bell shadows, retaining some of the benefits of both. For large $n$, we show that randomized measurements in $n$-qubit GHZ bases further improve the best scaling to $\sim (3\mathrm{/}2{)}^k$, albeit on an increasingly restricted set of operators. Despite their simplicity and lower hardware requirements, these protocols can match or outperform recently-introduced “shallow shadows” in some practically-relevant Pauli estimation tasks.