Antonio Anna Mele
banner
antonioannamele.bsky.social
Antonio Anna Mele
@antonioannamele.bsky.social
Thinking about Quantum information at Freie Universität Berlin
antonioannamele.com
Huge thanks to my coauthors, Lennart Bittel, @jenseisert.bsky.social, Marco Fanizza, @vishnu-psiyer.bsky.social, Junseo Lee, Lorenzo Leone, @francescoannamele.bsky.social , and Salvatore F. E. Oliviero.
November 8, 2025 at 7:09 AM
research.google/programs-and...

I’m honored for this support and grateful to all my collaborators who have made this research journey so exciting. I look forward to continuing my work in quantum information and using the fellowship to broaden my horizons!
Google PhD fellowship program
The Google PhD Fellowship Program recognizes outstanding graduate students doing exceptional work in computer science, related disciplines, or promising research areas.
research.google
October 24, 2025 at 9:15 PM
It was a great collaboration with Marco Fanizza, Vishnu Iyer, Junseo Lee and Francesco Anna Mele -- mostly entirely done over the past few months on a Whatsapp group that, due to the different time zones of our 3 different continents, was basically constantly active with new insightful messages. 😁
October 8, 2025 at 12:23 PM
All operations in the protocol are experimentally friendly for current photonic platforms, and the protocol has the nice feature that we can trade more input probe energy for lower sample complexity. 🔦
October 8, 2025 at 12:23 PM
Now I’m heading to Cologne for the “Clifford Commutant” workshop (quantum-randomness.com/clifford-wor...), organized by Markus Heinrich, Xhek Turkeshi, and David Gross, where our Berlin team will have the chance to present our recent paper: arxiv.org/abs/2504.12263. 🇩🇪
Workshop: "Clifford commutant and its applications"
quantum-randomness.com
June 29, 2025 at 3:29 PM
8/
We hope these results contribute to the toolbox of anyone working with Clifford circuits 🧰.

Thanks again for the wonderful collaboration to my amazing collaborators Lennart Bittel, @jenseisert.bsky.social, Lorenzo Leone, @sfeoliviero.bsky.social. 💪

We’re very happy to receive feedback! 👍
A complete theory of the Clifford commutant
The Clifford group plays a central role in quantum information science. It is the building block for many error-correcting schemes and matches the first three moments of the Haar measure over the unit...
arxiv.org
April 17, 2025 at 7:05 PM
7/
💥 Applications abound:
• Complete characterization of measurable magic measures 🧮
• Design of optimal stabilizer property testing strategies 🎯
• A new operational interpretation of stabilizer entropy 🔍, and more!
April 17, 2025 at 7:05 PM
6/
📐 We also introduce a graphical calculus tool to diagrammatically manipulate and visualize the elements of this new basis 🎨.

Perfect for hands-on calculations: It allowed us to save lots of writing 📚, as many pages of analytical calculations became just a few diagrams 😉.
April 17, 2025 at 7:05 PM
5/
This new "Pauli-sum" basis is intuitive and computationally friendly 💻.

It’s (gracefully) generated by products of:
• Permutation operators (which generate the commutant of the unitary group) 🔄
• Just three additional operators 🔑
April 17, 2025 at 7:05 PM
4/
🔧 In our work, we give a full description of the commutant for arbitrary n (qubits) and k (tensor powers):

- An explicit orthogonal basis 🧮

- The exact dimension of the commutant 📏

- A new, compact, and easy-to-manipulate basis formed by isotropic sums of Pauli operators 🔀
April 17, 2025 at 7:05 PM
3/
The seminal work arxiv.org/abs/1712.086... already provided a characterization of the Clifford commutant 🧠, assuming k was relatively small (less than linear with respect to the number of qubits n). However, a characterization for larger values of k was still missing 🤔.
Schur-Weyl Duality for the Clifford Group with Applications: Property Testing, a Robust Hudson Theorem, and de Finetti Representations
Schur-Weyl duality is a ubiquitous tool in quantum information. At its heart is the statement that the space of operators that commute with the tensor powers of all unitaries is spanned by the permutations of the tensor factors. In this work, we describe a similar duality theory for tensor powers of Clifford unitaries. The Clifford group is a central object in many subfields of quantum information, most prominently in the theory of fault-tolerance. The duality theory has a simple and clean description in terms of finite geometries. We demonstrate its effectiveness in several applications: (1) We resolve an open problem in quantum property testing by showing that "stabilizerness" is efficiently testable: There is a protocol that, given access to six copies of an unknown state, can determine whether it is a stabilizer state, or whether it is far away from the set of stabilizer states. We give a related membership test for the Clifford group. (2) We find that tensor powers of stabilizer states have an increased symmetry group. We provide corresponding de Finetti theorems, showing that the reductions of arbitrary states with this symmetry are well-approximated by mixtures of stabilizer tensor powers (in some cases, exponentially well). (3) We show that the distance of a pure state to the set of stabilizers can be lower-bounded in terms of the sum-negativity of its Wigner function. This gives a new quantitative meaning to the sum-negativity (and the related mana) -- a measure relevant to fault-tolerant quantum computation. The result constitutes a robust generalization of the discrete Hudson theorem. (4) We show that complex projective designs of arbitrary order can be obtained from a finite number (independent of the number of qudits) of Clifford orbits. To prove this result, we give explicit formulas for arbitrary moments of random stabilizer states.
arxiv.org
April 17, 2025 at 7:05 PM
2/
At the heart of understanding many properties of the Clifford group 💡 — and unlocking its broad range of applications 🚀 — lies its commutant: the set of operators that commute with the k-fold tensor powers of all Clifford unitaries.
April 17, 2025 at 7:05 PM
1/
The Clifford group is ubiquitous in quantum information 🌐.
It lies at the core of many key applications 🔑, including error correction, tomography, benchmarking, and more.

It consists of unitaries that map Pauli operators to Pauli operators under conjugation 🔄.
April 17, 2025 at 7:05 PM