Jianxin Chen

Classical simulation of quantum circuits is a critical tool for validating quantum hardware and probing the boundary between classical and quantum computational power. Existing state-of-the-art methods, notably tensor network approaches, have computational costs governed by the treewidth of the underlying circuit graph, making circuits with large treewidth intractable. This work rigorously analyzes FeynmanDD, a decision diagram-based simulation method proposed in CAV 2025 by a subset of the authors, and shows that the size of the multi-terminal decision diagram used in FeynmanDD is exponential in the linear rank-width of the circuit graph. As linear rank-width can be substantially smaller than treewidth and is at most larger than the treewidth by a logarithmic factor, our analysis demonstrates that FeynmanDD outperforms all tensor network-based methods for certain circuit families. We also show that the method remains efficient if we use the Solovay-Kitaev algorithm to expand arbitrary single-qubit gates to sequences of Hadamard and T gates, essentially removing the gate-set restriction posed by the method.

The quantum marginal problem asks whether a set of given density matrices are consistent, i.e., whether they can be the reduced density matrices of a global quantum state. Not many non-trivial analytic necessary (or sufficient) conditions are known for the problem in general. We propose a method to detect consistency of overlapping quantum marginals by considering the separability of some derived states. Our method works well for the $k$-symmetric extension problem in general, and for the general overlapping marginal problems in some cases. Our work is, in some sense, the converse to the well-known $k$-symmetric extension criterion for separability.