We develop a classical bit-flip correction method to mitigate measurement errors on quantum computers. This method can be applied to any operator, any number of qubits, and any realistic bit-flip probability. We first demonstrate the successful performance of this method by correcting the noisy measurements of the ground-state energy of the longitudinal Ising model. We then generalize our results to arbitrary operators and test our method both numerically and experimentally on IBM quantum hardware. As a result, our correction method reduces the measurement error on the quantum hardware by up to one order of magnitude. We finally discuss how to pre-process the method and extend it to other errors sources beyond measurement errors. For local Hamiltonians, the overhead costs are polynomial in the number of qubits, even if multi-qubit correlations are included.
We present an error mitigation scheme which corrects readout errors on Noisy Intermediate-Scale Quantum (NISQ) computers [1,2]. After a short review of applying the method to one qubit, we proceed to discuss the case when correlations between different qubits occur. We demonstrate how the readout error can be mitigated in this case. By performing experiments on IBMQ hardware, we show that such correlations do not have a strong effect on the results, justifying to neglect them.
Readout errors are among the most dominant errors on current noisy intermediate-scale quantum devices. Recently, an efficient and scaleable method for mitigating such errors has been developed, based on classical bit-flip correction. In this talk, we compare the performance of this method for IBM's and Rigetti's quantum devices, demonstrating how the method improves the noisy measurements of observables obtained on the quantum hardware. Moreover, we examine the variance amplification to the data after applying of our mitigation procedure, which is common to all mitigation strategies. We derive…
Quantum computers are becoming increasingly accessible, and may soon outperform classical computers for useful tasks. However, qubit readout errors remain a significant hurdle to running quantum algorithms on current devices. We present a scheme to more efficiently mitigate these errors on quantum hardware and numerically show that our method consistently gives advantage over previous mitigation schemes. Our scheme removes biases in the readout errors allowing a general error model to be built with far fewer calibration measurements. Specifically, for reading out $n$-qubits we show a factor of…
Quantum protocols for coin-flipping can be composed in series in such a way that a cheating party gains no extra advantage from using entanglement between different rounds. This composition principle applies to coin-flipping protocols with cheat sensitivity as well, and is used to derive two results: There are no quantum strong coin-flipping protocols with cheat sensitivity that is linear in the bias (or bit-commitment protocols with linear cheat detection) because these can be composed to produce strong coin-flipping with arbitrarily small bias. On the other hand, it appears that quadratic ch…
A quantum system interacts with its environment, if ever so slightly, no matter how much care is put into isolating it. As a consequence, quantum bits (qubits) undergo errors, putting dauntingly difficult constraints on the hardware suitable for quantum computation. New strategies are emerging to circumvent this problem by encoding a qubit non-locally across the phase space of a physical system. Since most sources of decoherence are due to local fluctuations, the foundational promise is to exponentially suppress errors by increasing a measure of this non-locality. Prominent examples are topolo…
Bit commitment is a fundamental cryptographic primitive with numerous applications. Quantum information allows for bit commitment schemes in the information theoretic setting where no dishonest party can perfectly cheat. The previously best-known quantum protocol by Ambainis achieved a cheating probability of at most 3/4[Amb01]. On the other hand, Kitaev showed that no quantum protocol can have cheating probability less than 1/sqrt{2} [Kit03] (his lower bound on coin flipping can be easily extended to bit commitment). Closing this gap has since been an important and open question. In this pape…
In the present article, the robustness of entanglement in two qubits maximally entangled mixed states (MEME) have been studied under quantum decoherence channels. Here we consider bit flip, phase flip, bit-phase-flip, amplitude damping, phase damping and depolarization channels. To quantify the entanglement, the concurrence has been used as an entanglement measure. During this study interesting results have been found for sudden death and birth of entanglement under bit flip and bit-phase-flip channels. While amplitude damping channel produces entanglement sudden death and does not allow re-bi…
In this paper, we focus on a special framework for quantum coin flipping protocols,_bit-commitment based protocols_, within which almost all known protocols fit. We show a lower bound of 1/16 for the bias in any such protocol. We also analyse a sequence of multi-round protocol that tries to overcome the drawbacks of the previously proposed protocols, in order to lower the bias. We show an intricate cheating strategy for this sequence, which leads to a bias of 1/4. This indicates that a bias of 1/4 might be optimal in such protocols, and also demonstrates that a cleverer proof technique may be …
Although qubit coherence times and gate fidelities are continuously improving, logical encoding is essential to achieve fault tolerance in quantum computing. In most encoding schemes, correcting or tracking errors throughout the computation is necessary to implement a universal gate set without adding significant delays in the processor. Here we realize a classical control architecture for the fast extraction of errors based on multiple cycles of stabilizer measurements and subsequent correction. We demonstrate its application on a minimal bit-flip code with five transmon qubits, showing that …
Recently, the theoretical work of Fröwis and W. Dür (Phys. Rev. Lett. \textbf{106}, 110402 (2011)) and the experiment of Lu \emph{et al.} (Nat. Photon. \textbf{8}, 364 (2014)) both showed that the logic-qubit entanglement has its potential application in future quantum communication and quantum network. However, the entanglement will suffer from the noise and decoherence. In this paper, we will investigate the entanglement purification for logic-qubit entanglement. We show that both the bit-flip error and phase-flip error in logic-qubit entanglement can be well purified. Moreover, the bit-flip…
Topological quantum error correction codes are currently among the most promising candidates for efficiently dealing with the decoherence effects inherently present in quantum devices. Numerically, their theoretical error threshold can be calculated by mapping the underlying quantum problem to a related classical statistical-mechanical spin system with quenched disorder. Here, we present results for the general fault-tolerant regime, where we consider both qubit and measurement errors. However, unlike in previous studies, here we vary the strength of the different error sources independently. …
We investigate how the Unruh effect affects the transition between classical and quantum decoherences for a general class of initial states and find that: $(i)$ The quantum decoherence exists while $λt\leqλ\widetilde{t}$ (the transition time) and the classical one can also affect the system's evolution while $λt\geqλ\widetilde{t}$ for both the bit and phase-bit flips, which are different from the cases in inertial frame; $(ii)$ The classical correlations will be different constants corresponding to different Unruh temperature and the quantum decoherence still dominates the evolution of system …
We study the performance of simple error correcting and error avoiding quantum codes together with their concatenation for correlated noise models. Specifically, we consider two error models: i) a bit-flip (phase-flip) noisy Markovian memory channel (model I); ii) a memory channel defined as a memory degree dependent linear combination of memoryless channels with Kraus decompositions expressed solely in terms of tensor products of X-Pauli (Z-Pauli) operators (model II). The performance of both the three-qubit bit flip (phase flip) and the error avoiding codes suitable for the considered error …
The pulse control of decoherence in a qubit interacting with a quantum environment is studied with focus on a general case where decoherence is induced by both pure dephasing and population decay. To observe how the decoherence is suppressed by periodic pi pulses, we present a simple method to calculate the time evolution of a qubit under arbitrary pulse sequences consisting of bit-flips and/or phase-flips. We examine the effectiveness of the two typical sequences: bb sequence consisting of only bit-flips, and bp sequence consisting of both bit- and phase-flips. It is shown that the effectiven…
Quantum annealing and D-Wave quantum annealer attracted considerable attention for their ability to solve combinatorial optimization problems. In order to solve other type of optimization problems, it is necessary to apply certain kinds of mathematical transformations. However, linear constraints reduce the size of problems that can be represented in quantum annealers, owing to the sparseness of connections between qubits. For example, the quadratic assignment problem (QAP) with linear equality constraints can be solved only up to size 12 in the quantum annealer D-Wave Advantage, which has 564…
Quantum data is susceptible to decoherence induced by the environment and to errors in the hardware processing it. A future fault-tolerant quantum computer will use quantum error correction (QEC) to actively protect against both. In the smallest QEC codes, the information in one logical qubit is encoded in a two-dimensional subspace of a larger Hilbert space of multiple physical qubits. For each code, a set of non-demolition multi-qubit measurements, termed stabilizers, can discretize and signal physical qubit errors without collapsing the encoded information. Experimental demonstrations of QE…
Single-photon detectors are ubiquitous and integral components of photonic quantum cryptography, communication, and computation. Many applications, however, require not only detecting the presence of any photons, but distinguishing the number present with a single shot. Here, we implement a single-shot, high-fidelity photon number-resolving detector of up to 15 microwave photons in a cavity-qubit circuit QED platform. This detector functions by measuring a series of generalized parity operators which make up the bits in the binary decomposition of the photon number. Our protocol consists of su…
By introducing a semi-honest third party (TP), we propose in this paper a novel QPC protocol using (n+1)- qubit (n \ge 2) Greenberger-Horne-Zeilinger (GHZ) states as information carriers. The parameter n not only determines the number of qubits contained in a GHZ state, but also determines the probability that TP can successfully steal the participants' data and the qubit efficiency. In the proposed protocol, we do not employ any other quantum technologies (e.g., entanglement swapping and unitary operation) except necessary technologies such as preparing quantum states and quantum measurements…
The effect of decoherence on a qubit-qutrit system under the influence of global and multilocal decoherence in non-inertial frames is investigated. It is shown that the entanglement sudden death (ESD) can be avoided in non-inertial frames in the presence of dephasing and bit-trit phase flip channels for entire range of decoherence. However, ESD behaviour is seen for higher level of decoherence in case of phase flip and bit-trit flip channels. Irrespective of the entanglement degradation caused by the Unruh effect, no ESD occurs for the dephasing environment. Furthermore, flipping channels have…
Current approaches for building quantum computing devices focus on two-level quantum systems which nicely mimic the concept of a classical bit, albeit enhanced with additional quantum properties. However, rather than artificially limiting the number of states to two, the use of d-level quantum systems (qudits) could provide advantages for quantum information processing. Among other merits, it has recently been shown that multi-level quantum systems can offer increased stability to external disturbances - a key problem in current technologies. In this study we demonstrate that topological quant…
Logic-qubit entanglement has attracted much attention in both quantum communication and quantum computation. Here, we present an efficient protocol to distill the logic-qubit entanglement with the help of cross-Kerr nonlinearity. This protocol not only can purify the logic bit-flip error and logic phase-flip error, but also can correct the physical bit-flip error completely. We use cross-Kerr nonlinearity to construct quantum nondemolition detectors. Our distillation protocol for logic-qubit entanglement may be useful for the practical applications in quantum information, especially in long-di…
We investigate the system-environment information flow from the point of view ofcomplete complementarity relations. We consider some commonly used noisy quantum channels:Amplitude damping, phase damping, bit flip, bit-phase flip, phase flip, depolarizing, and correlatedamplitude damping. By starting with an entangled bipartite pure quantum state, with the linearentropy being the quantifier of entanglement, we study how entanglement is redistributed and turnedinto general correlations between the degrees of freedom of the whole system. For instance, it ispossible to express the entanglement ent…
Logic-qubit entanglement is a promising resource in quantum information processing, especially in future large-scale quantum networks. In the paper, we put forward an efficient entanglement purification protocol (EPP) for nonlocal mixed logic entangled states with the bit-flip error in the logic qubits of the logic Bell state, resorting to the photon-atom interaction in low-quality (Q) cavity and atomic state measurement. Different from existing EPPs, this protocol can also purify the logic phase-flip error, and the bit-flip error and the phase-flip error in physic qubit. During the protocol, …
Recently Xiao et al. proposed a scheme for entanglement purification based on doubly entangled photon states (Phys. Rev. A 77(2008) 042315). We modify their scheme for improving the efficiency of entanglement purification. This modified scheme contains two steps, i.e., the bit-flip error correction and the entanglement purification of phase-flip errors. All the photon pairs in the first step can be kept as all the bit-flip errors are corrected. For purifying the phase-flip errors, a wavelength conversion process is needed. This scheme has the advantage of high efficiency and it requires the or…
In this article, by considering Bell-diagonal two-qubit initial states submitted to local dynamics generated by the phase damping, bit flip, phase flip, bit-phase flip, and depolarizing channels, we report some elegant direct-dynamical relations between geometric measures of entanglement and discord. The complex scenario appearing already in this simplified case study indicates that similarly simple relation shall hardly be found in more general situations.
We focus on a family of quantum coin-flipping protocols based on bit-commitment. We discuss how the semidefinite programming formulations of cheating strategies can be reduced to optimizing a linear combination of fidelity functions over a polytope. These turn out to be much simpler semidefinite programs which can be modelled using second-order cone programming problems. We then use these simplifications to construct their point games as developed by Kitaev. We also study the classical version of these protocols and use linear optimization to formulate optimal cheating strategies. We then cons…
Recently, quantum error-correcting codes were proposed that capitalize on the fact that many physical error models lead to a significant asymmetry between the probabilities for bit flip and phase flip errors. An example for a channel which exhibits such asymmetry is the combined amplitude damping and dephasing channel, where the probabilities of bit flips and phase flips can be related to relaxation and dephasing time, respectively. We give systematic constructions of asymmetric quantum stabilizer codes that exploit this asymmetry. Our approach is based on a CSS construction that combines BCH …
