As superconducting qubits continue to advance technologically, the realization of quantum algorithms from theoretical abstraction to physical implementation requires knowledge of both quantum circuit construction as well as hardware limitations. In this study we present results from experiments run on IBM's 20-qubit `Poughkeepsie' architecture, with the goal of demonstrating various qubit qualities and challenges that arise in designing quantum algorithms. These include experimentally measuring $T_1$ and $T_2$ coherence times, gate fidelities, sequential CNOT gates, techniques for handling ancilla qubits, and finally CCNOT and QFT$^{\dagger}$ circuits implemented on several different qubit geometries. Our results demonstrate various techniques for improving quantum circuits which must compensate for limited connectivity, either through the use of SWAP gates or additional ancilla qubits.
Kernel methods are the basis of most classical machine learning algorithms such as Gaussian Process (GP) and Support Vector Machine (SVM). Computing kernels using noisy intermediate scale quantum (NISQ) devices has attracted considerable attention due to recent progress in the design of NISQ devices. However noise and errors on current NISQ devices can negatively affect the predicted kernels. In this paper we utilize two quantum kernel machine learning (ML) algorithms to predict the labels of a Breast Cancer dataset on two different NISQ devices: quantum kernel Gaussian Process (qkGP) and quan…
It is hard to achieve a theoretical quantum advantage on NISQ devices. Besides the attempts to reduce error using error mitigation and dynamical decoupling, small quantum error correction and fault-tolerant schemes that reduce the high overhead of traditional schemes have also been proposed. According to the recent advancements in fault tolerance, it is possible to minimize the number of ancillary qubits using flags. While implementing those schemes is still impossible, it is worthwhile to bridge the gap between the NISQ era and the FTQC era. Here, we introduce a benchmarking method to test fa…
The rapid development of quantum computing (QC) in the NISQ era urgently demands a low-level benchmark suite and insightful evaluation metrics for characterizing the properties of prototype NISQ devices, the efficiency of QC programming compilers, schedulers and assemblers, and the capability of quantum system simulators in a classical computer. In this work, we fill this gap by proposing a low-level, easy-to-use benchmark suite called QASMBench based on the OpenQASM assembly representation. It consolidates commonly used quantum routines and kernels from a variety of domains including chemistr…
Despite the advent of Grover's algorithm for the unstructured search, its successful implementation on near-term quantum devices is still limited. We apply three strategies to reduce the errors associated with implementing quantum search algorithms. Our improved search algorithms have been implemented on the IBM quantum processors. Using them, we demonstrate three- and four-qubit search algorithm with higher average success probabilities compared to previous works. We present the successful execution of the five-qubit search on the IBM quantum processor for the first time. The results have bee…
Universal fault-tolerant quantum computers require millions of qubits with low error rates. Since this technology is years ahead, noisy intermediate-scale quantum (NISQ) computation is receiving tremendous interest. In this setup, quantum reservoir computing is a relevant machine learning algorithm. Its simplicity of training and implementation allows to perform challenging computations on today available machines. In this Letter, we provide a criterion to select optimal quantum reservoirs, requiring few and simple gates. Our findings demonstrate that they render better results than other comm…
Reducing the Number of Qubits from $n^2$ to $n\log_{2} (n)$ to Solve the Traveling Salesman Problem with Quantum Computers: A Proposal for Demonstrating Quantum Supremacy in the NISQ Era
The advent of noisy intermediate-scale quantum (NISQ) devices offers crucial opportunities for the development of quantum algorithms. Here we evaluate the noise tolerance of two quantum neural network (QNN) architectures on IBM's NISQ devices, namely, dissipative QNN (DQNN) whose building-block perceptron is a completely positive map, and the quantum approximate optimization algorithm (QAOA). We compare these two approaches to learning an unknown unitary. While both networks succeed in this learning task, we find that a DQNN learns an unknown unitary more reliably than QAOA and is less suscept…
Implementing a quantum algorithm on a NISQ device has several challenges that arise from the fact that such devices are noisy and have limited quantum resources. Thus, various factors contributing to the depth and width as well as to the noise of an implementation of an algorithm must be understood in order to assess whether an implementation will execute successfully on a given NISQ device. In this contribution, we discuss these factors and their impact on algorithm implementations. Especially, we will cover state preparation, oracle expansion, connectivity, circuit rewriting, and readout: th…
When noisy intermediate scalable quantum (NISQ) devices are applied in information processing, all of the stages through preparation, manipulation, and measurement of multipartite qubit states contain various types of noise that are generally hard to be verified in practice. In this work, we present a scheme to deal with unknown quantum noise and show that it can be used to mitigate errors in measurement readout with NISQ devices. Quantum detector tomography that identifies a type of noise in a measurement can be circumvented. The scheme applies single-qubit operations only, that are with rela…
Many researchers have been heavily investigated on quantum phase estimation (QPE) algorithms to find the unknown phase, since QPE is the core building block of the most quantum algorithms such as the Shor's factoring algorithm, quantum sampling algorithms, and finding the eigenvalues of unitary matrices. Kitaev's algorithm and QPE algorithms using inverse Quantum Fourier transform were proposed and widely used by researchers as a key component for their quantum algorithms. In this paper, we explore the experimental challenges of QPE algorithms on Noisy Intermediate-Scale Quantum (NISQ) compute…
The progress in developing quantum hardware with functional quantum processors integrating tens of noisy qubits, together with the availability of near-term quantum algorithms has led to the release of the first quantum computers. These quantum computing systems already integrate different software and hardware components of the so-called "full-stack", bridging quantum applications to quantum devices. In this paper, we will provide an overview on current full-stack quantum computing systems. We will emphasize the need for tight co-design among adjacent layers as well as vertical cross-layer de…
Quantum machine learning is at the crossroads of two of the most exciting current areas of research; quantum computing and classical machine learning. It explores the interaction between quantum computing and machine learning, investigating how results and techniques from one field can be used to solve the problems of the other. Here, we investigate quantum support vector machine (QSVM) algorithm and its circuit version on present quantum computers. We propose a general encoding procedure extending QSVM algorithm, which would allow one to feed vectors with higher dimension in the training-data…
The advent of Noisy Intermediate-Scale Quantum (NISQ) technology is changing rapidly the landscape and modality of research in quantum physics. NISQ devices, such as the IBM Q Experience, have very recently proven their capability as experimental platforms accessible to everyone around the globe. Until now, IBM Q Experience processors have mostly been used for quantum computation and simulation of closed systems. Here we show that these devices are also able to implement a great variety of paradigmatic open quantum systems models, hence providing a robust and flexible testbed for open quantum …
This paper addresses the practical aspects of quantum algorithms used in numerical integration, specifically their implementation on Noisy Intermediate-Scale Quantum (NISQ) devices. Quantum algorithms for numerical integration utilize Quantum Amplitude Estimation (QAE) (Brassard et al., 2002) in conjunction with Grovers algorithm. However, QAE is daunting to implement on NISQ devices since it typically relies on Quantum Phase Estimation (QPE), which requires many ancilla qubits and controlled operations. To mitigate these challenges, a recently published QAE algorithm (Suzuki et al., 2020), wh…
Current noise levels in physical realizations of qubits and quantum operations limit the applicability of conventional methods to characterize entanglement. In this adverse scenario, we follow a quantum variational approach to estimate the geometric measure of entanglement of multiqubit pure states. The algorithm requires only single-qubit gates and measurements, so it is well suited for NISQ devices. This is demonstrated by successfully implementing the method on IBM Quantum devices for Greenberger-Horne-Zeilinger states of $3$, $4$, and $5$ qubits. Numerical simulations with random states sh…
While mapping a quantum circuit to the physical layer one has to consider the numerous constraints imposed by the underlying hardware architecture. Connectivity of the physical qubits is one such constraint that restricts two-qubit operations, such as CNOT, to "connected" qubits. SWAP gates can be used to place the logical qubits on admissible physical qubits, but they entail a significant increase in CNOT-count. In this paper we consider the problem of reducing the CNOT-count in Clifford+T circuits on connectivity constrained architectures, like noisy intermediate-scale quantum (NISQ) computi…
Naval Surface Warfare Center, Dahlgren Division（海军水面作战中心达尔格伦分部）
In the NISQ-era of quantum computing, we should not expect to see quantum devices that provide an exponential improvement in runtime for practical problems, due to the lack of error correction and small number of qubits available. Nevertheless, these devices should be able to provide other performance improvements, particularly when combined with existing classical machines. In this article, we develop several hybrid quantum-classical clustering algorithms that can be employed as subroutines on small, NISQ-era devices. These new hybrid algorithms require a number of qubits that is at most loga…
The intractability of deterministic solutions in solving $\mathcal{NP}$-Hard Combinatorial Optimisation Problems (COP) is well reported in the literature. One mechanism for overcoming this difficulty has been the use of efficient COP non-deterministic approaches. However, with the advent of quantum technology, these modern devices' potential to overcome this tractability limitation requires exploration. This paper juxtaposes classical and quantum optimisation algorithms' performance to solve two common COP, the Travelling Salesman Problem (TSP) and the Quadratic Assignment Problem (QAP). Two a…
We are in the Noisy Intermediate-Scale Quantum (NISQ) devices' era, in which quantum hardware has become available for application in real-world problems. However, demonstrating the usefulness of such NISQ devices are still rare. In this work, we consider a practical railway dispatching problem: delay and conflict management on single-track railway lines. We examine the issue of train dispatching consequences caused by the arrival of an already delayed train to the network segment being considered. This problem is computationally hard and needs to be solved almost in real-time. We introduce a …
Near-term quantum computation holds potential across multiple application domains. However, imperfect preparation and evolution of states due to algorithmic and experimental shortcomings, characteristic in the near-term implementation, would typically result in measurement outcomes deviating from the ideal setting. It is thus crucial for any near-term application to quantify and bound these output errors. We address this need by deriving robustness intervals which are guaranteed to contain the output in the ideal setting. The first type of interval is based on formulating robustness bounds as …
In this work, we propose IQGAN, a quantum Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) framework for multiqubit image synthesis that can be efficiently implemented on Noisy Intermediate Scale Quantum (NISQ) devices. We investigate the reasons for the inferior generative performance of current quantum GANs in our preliminary study and conclude that an adjustable input encoder is the key to ensuring high-quality data synthesis. We then propose the IQGAN architecture featuring a trainable multiqubit quantum encoder that effectively embeds classical data into quantum states. Furthermore, we propose a comp…
We develop a quantum computing scheme utilizing McLachlan variational principle in a hybrid quantum-classical algorithm to accurately calculate the transition dynamics of a closed quantum system with many excited states subject to a strong time-dependent perturbation. A systematic approach for optimal construction of a general N-state ansatz with unary N-qubit encoding is refined. We also utilize qubit efficient encoding in McLachlan variational quantum algorithm to reduce the number of qubits to log2 N, simultaneously diminishing depths of the quantum circuits. The significant reduction of th…
We execute the quantum eraser, the Elitzur-Vaidman bomb, and the Hardy's paradox experiment using high-level programming language on a generic, gate-based superconducting quantum processor made publicly available by IBM. The quantum circuits for these experiments use a mixture of one-qubit and multi-qubit gates and require high entanglement gate accuracy. The results aligned with theoretical predictions of quantum mechanics to high confidence on circuits using up to 3 qubits. The power of quantum computers and high-level language as a platform for experimenting and studying quantum phenomena i…
In the early years of fault-tolerant quantum computing (FTQC), it is expected that the available code distance and the number of magic states will be restricted due to the limited scalability of quantum devices and the insufficient computational power of classical decoding units. Here, we integrate quantum error correction and quantum error mitigation into an efficient FTQC architecture that effectively increases the code distance and $T$-gate count at the cost of constant sampling overheads in a wide range of quantum computing regimes. For example, while we need $10^4$ to $10^{10}$ logical op…
Noisy Intermediate-Scale Quantum (NISQ) hardware has unavoidable noises, and crosstalk error is a significant error source. When multiple quantum operations are executed simultaneously, the quantum state can be corrupted due to the crosstalk between gates during simultaneous operations, decreasing the circuit fidelity. In this work, we first report on several protocols for characterizing crosstalk. Then, we discuss different crosstalk mitigation methods from the hardware and software perspectives. Finally, we perform crosstalk injection experiments on the IBM quantum device and demonstrate the…
The Poisson equation has many applications across the broad areas of science and engineering. Most quantum algorithms for the Poisson solver presented so far, either suffer from lack of accuracy and/or are limited to very small sizes of the problem, and thus have no practical usage. Here we present an advanced quantum algorithm for solving the Poisson equation with high accuracy and dynamically tunable problem size. After converting the Poisson equation to the linear systems through the finite difference method, we adopt the Harrow-Hassidim-Lloyd (HHL) algorithm as the basic framework. Particu…
Because noisy, intermediate-scale quantum (NISQ) machines accumulate errors quickly, we need new approaches to designing NISQ-aware algorithms and assessing their performance. Algorithms with characteristics that appear less desirable under ideal circumstances, such as lower success probability, may in fact outperform their ideal counterparts on existing hardware. We propose an adaptation of Grover's algorithm, subdividing the phase flip into segments to replace a digital counter and complex phase flip decision logic. We applied this approach to obtaining the best solution of the MAX-CUT probl…
The Noisy Intermediate-Scale Quantum (NISQ) technology is currently investigated by major players in the field to build the first practically useful quantum computer. IBM QX architectures are the first ones which are already publicly available today. However, in order to use them, the respective quantum circuits have to be compiled for the respectively used target architecture. While first approaches have been proposed for this purpose, they are infeasible for a certain set of SU(4) quantum circuits which have recently been introduced to benchmark corresponding compilers. In this work, we anal…
Noisy Intermediate-Scale Quantum (NISQ) technology will be available in the near future. Quantum computers with 50-100 qubits may be able to perform tasks which surpass the capabilities of today's classical digital computers, but noise in quantum gates will limit the size of quantum circuits that can be executed reliably. NISQ devices will be useful tools for exploring many-body quantum physics, and may have other useful applications, but the 100-qubit quantum computer will not change the world right away --- we should regard it as a significant step toward the more powerful quantum technologi…
In this article, we propose an interactive protocol for one party (the verifier) holding a quantum computer to verify the quantum computation power of another party's (the prover) device via a one-way quantum channel. This protocol is referred to as the dihedral coset problem (DCP) challenge. The verifier needs to prepare quantum states encoding secrets (DCP samples) and send them to the prover. The prover is then tasked with recovering those secrets with a certain accuracy. Numerical simulation demonstrates that this accuracy is sensitive to errors in quantum hardware. Additionally, the DCP c…
We review the development of generative modeling techniques in machine learning for the purpose of reconstructing real, noisy, many-qubit quantum states. Motivated by its interpretability and utility, we discuss in detail the theory of the restricted Boltzmann machine. We demonstrate its practical use for state reconstruction, starting from a classical thermal distribution of Ising spins, then moving systematically through increasingly complex pure and mixed quantum states. Intended for use on experimental noisy intermediate-scale quantum (NISQ) devices, we review recent efforts in reconstruct…
GroverFigureOfMerit: An Agnostic Figure of Merit for Quantum Backend Characterization in the NISQ Era
Universidad Nacional de La Plata, Facultad de Informática, Laboratorio de Investigación y Formación en Informática Avanzada (LIFIA)（拉普拉塔国立大学，计算机学院，先进信息研究与培训实验室）
A key problem in the field of quantum computing is understanding whether quantum machine learning (QML) models implemented on noisy intermediate-scale quantum (NISQ) machines can achieve quantum advantages. Recently, Huang et al. [Nat Commun 12, 2631] partially answered this question by the lens of quantum kernel learning. Namely, they exhibited that quantum kernels can learn specific datasets with lower generalization error over the optimal classical kernel methods. However, most of their results are established on the ideal setting and ignore the caveats of near-term quantum machines. To thi…
Error mitigation is one of the key challenges in realising the full potential of quantum cryptographic protocols. Consequently, there is a lot of interest in adapting techniques from quantum error correction (QEC) to improve the robustness of quantum cryptographic protocols. In this work, we benchmark the performance of different QKD protocols on noisy quantum devices, with and without error correction. We obtain the secure key rates of BB84, B92 and BBM92 QKD protocols over a quantum channel that is subject to amplitude-damping noise. We demonstrate, theoretically and via implementations on t…
Efficient time-series prediction on NISQ devices via time-delayed quantum extreme learning machine
Tokyo University of Agriculture and Technology（东京农工大学）；Technische Universität Ilmenau（埃尔朗根-纽伦堡工业大学）；The Institute of Medical Science, The University of Tokyo（东京大学医学科学研究所）；The Graduate School of Information Science and Technology, The University of Tokyo（东京大学信息理工学系研究科）
Since the publication of the Quantum Amplitude Estimation (QAE) algorithm by Brassard et al., 2002, several variations have been proposed, such as Aaronson et al., 2019, Grinko et al., 2019, and Suzuki et al., 2020. The main difference between the original and the variants is the exclusion of Quantum Phase Estimation (QPE) by the latter. This difference is notable given that QPE is the key component of original QAE, but is composed of many operations considered expensive for the current NISQ era devices. We compare two recently proposed variants (Grinko et al., 2019 and Suzuki et al., 2020) by…
