We develop a simulator for quantum computers composed of superconducting transmon qubits. The simulation model supports an arbitrary number of transmons and resonators. Quantum gates are implemented by time-dependent pulses. Nontrivial effects such as crosstalk, leakage to non-computational states, entanglement between transmons and resonators, and control errors due to the pulses are inherently included. The time evolution of the quantum computer is obtained by solving the time-dependent Schrödinger equation. The simulation algorithm shows excellent scalability on high-performance supercomputers. We present results for the simulation of up to 16 transmons and resonators. Additionally, the model can be used to simulate environments, and we demonstrate the transition from an isolated system to an open quantum system governed by a Lindblad master equation. We also describe a procedure to extract model parameters from electromagnetic simulations or experiments. We compare simulation results to experiments on several NISQ processors of the IBM Q Experience. We find nearly perfect agreement between simulation and experiment for quantum circuits designed to probe crosstalk in transmon systems. By studying common gate metrics such as the fidelity or the diamond distance, we find that they cannot reliably predict the performance of repeated gate applications or practical quantum algorithms. As an alternative, we find that the results from two-transmon gate set tomography have an exceptional predictive power. Finally, we test a protocol from the theory of quantum error correction and fault tolerance. We find that the protocol systematically improves the performance of transmon quantum computers in the presence of characteristic control and measurement errors.
Classical simulation is important because it sets a benchmark for quantum computer performance. Classical simulation is currently the only way to exercise larger numbers of qubits. To achieve larger simulations, sparse matrix processing is emphasized below while trading memory for processing. It performed well within NCSA supercomputers, giving a state vector in convenient continuous portions ready for post processing.
In the model of gate-based quantum computation, the qubits are controlled by a sequence of quantum gates. In superconducting qubit systems, these gates can be implemented by voltage pulses. The success of implementing a particular gate can be expressed by various metrics such as the average gate fidelity, the diamond distance, and the unitarity. We analyze these metrics of gate pulses for a system of two superconducting transmon qubits coupled by a resonator, a system inspired by the architecture of the IBM Quantum Experience. The metrics are obtained by numerical solution of the time-dependen…
We use a massively parallel simulator of a universal quantum computer to benchmark some of the most powerful supercomputers in the world. We find nearly ideal scaling behavior on the Sunway TaihuLight, the K computer, the IBM BlueGene/Q JUQUEEN, and the Intel Xeon based clusters JURECA and JUWELS. On the Sunway TaihuLight and the K computer, universal quantum computers with up to 48 qubits can be simulated by means of an adaptive two-byte encoding to reduce the memory requirements by a factor of eight. Additionally, we discuss an alternative approach to alleviate the memory bottleneck by decom…
Fixed-frequency transmon quantum computers (QCs) have advanced in coherence times, addressability, and gate fidelities. Unfortunately, these devices are restricted by the number of on-chip qubits, capping processing power and slowing progress toward fault-tolerance. Although emerging transmon devices feature over 100 qubits, building QCs large enough for meaningful demonstrations of quantum advantage requires overcoming many design challenges. For example, today's transmon qubits suffer from significant variation due to limited precision in fabrication. As a result, barring significant improve…
Cloud-based quantum computers have become a reality with a number of companies allowing for cloud-based access to their machines with tens to more than 100 qubits. With easy access to quantum computers, quantum information processing will potentially revolutionize computation, and superconducting transmon-based quantum computers are among some of the more promising devices available. Cloud service providers today host a variety of these and other prototype quantum computers with highly diverse device properties, sizes, and performances. The variation that exists in today's quantum computers, e…
The Continuous Spontaneous Localization (CSL) model is an alternative formulation of quantum mechanics which introduces a noise coupled non linearly to the wave function to account for its collapse. We consider CSL effects on quantum computers made of superconducting transmon qubits. As a direct effect CSL reduces quantum superpositions of the computational basis states of the qubits: we show the reduction rate to be negligibly small. However, an indirect effect of CSL, dissipation induced by the noise, also leads transmon qubits to decohere, by generating additional quasiparticles. Since the …
Large-scale quantum computers will inevitably need quantum error correction to protect information against decoherence. Traditional error correction typically requires many qubits, along with high-efficiency error syndrome measurement and real-time feedback. Autonomous quantum error correction (AQEC) instead uses steady-state bath engineering to perform the correction in a hardware-efficient manner. We realize an AQEC scheme, implemented with only two transmon qubits in a 2D scalable architecture, that actively corrects single-photon loss and passively suppresses low-frequency dephasing using …
Building a scalable quantum computer requires developing appropriate models to understand and verify its complex quantum dynamics. We focus on superconducting quantum processors based on transmons for which full numerical simulations are already challenging at the level of qubytes. It is thus highly desirable to develop accurate methods of modeling qubit networks that do not rely solely on numerical computations. Using systematic perturbation theory to large orders in the transmon regime, we derive precise analytic expressions of the transmon parameters. We apply our results to the case of par…
Boson sampling, thought to be intractable classically, can be solved by a quantum machine composed of merely generation, linear evolution and detection of single photons. Such an analog quantum computer for this specific problem provides a shortcut to boost the absolute computing power of quantum computers to beat classical ones. However, the capacity bound of classical computers for simulating boson sampling has not yet been identified. Here we simulate boson sampling on the Tianhe-2 supercomputer which occupied the first place in the world ranking six times from 2013 to 2016. We computed the…
Although two-qubit entangling gates are necessary for universal quantum computing, they are notoriously difficult to implement with high fidelity. Recently, tunable couplers have become a key component for realizing high-fidelity two-qubit gates in superconducting quantum computers. However, it is still difficult to achieve tunable coupling free of unwanted residual coupling for highly detuned qubits, which are desirable for mitigating qubit-frequency crowding or errors due to crosstalk between qubits. We thus propose a design for this kind of tunable coupler, which we call a double-transmon c…
Surface code is an error-correcting method that can be applied to the implementation of a usable quantum computer. At present, a promising candidate for a usable quantum computer is based on superconductor-specifically transmon. Because errors in transmon-based quantum computers appear biasedly as Z type errors, tailored surface and XZZX codes have been developed to deal with the type errors. Even though these surface codes have been suggested for lattice structures, since transmons-based quantum computers, developed by IBM, have a heavy-hexagon structure, it is natural to ask how tailored sur…
Like a quantum computer designed for a particular class of problems, a quantum simulator enables quantitative modeling of quantum systems that is computationally intractable with a classical computer. Quantum simulations of quantum many-body systems have been performed using ultracold atoms and trapped ions among other systems. Superconducting circuits have recently been investigated as an alternative system in which microwave photons confined to a lattice of coupled resonators act as the particles under study with qubits coupled to the resonators producing effective photon-photon interactions…
Quantum computation is conventionally performed using quantum operations acting on two-level quantum bits, or qubits. Qubits in modern quantum computers suffer from inevitable detrimental interactions with the environment that cause errors during computation, with multi-qubit operations often being a primary limitation. Most quantum devices naturally have multiple accessible energy levels beyond the lowest two traditionally used to define a qubit. Qudits offer a larger state space to store and process quantum information, reducing complexity of quantum circuits and improving efficiency of quan…
In recent years qubit designs such as transmons approached the fidelities of up to 0.999. However, even these devices are still insufficient for realizing quantum error correction requiring better than 0.9999 fidelity. Topologically protected superconducting qubits are arguably most prospective for building a realistic quantum computer as they are intrinsically protected from noise and leakage errors that occur in transmons. We propose a topologically protected qubit design based on a $π$-periodic Josephson element and a universal set of gates: protected Clifford group and highly robust (with …
A quantum computer has now solved a specialized problem believed to be intractable for supercomputers, suggesting that quantum processors may soon outperform supercomputers on scientifically important problems. But flaws in each quantum processor limit its capability by causing errors in quantum programs, and it is currently difficult to predict what programs a particular processor can successfully run. We introduce techniques that can efficiently test the capabilities of any programmable quantum computer, and we apply them to twelve processors. Our experiments show that current hardware suffe…
With the increasing size of quantum processors, sub-modules that constitute the processor hardware will become too large to accurately simulate on a classical computer. Therefore, one would soon have to fabricate and test each new design primitive and parameter choice in time-consuming coordination between design, fabrication, and experimental validation. Here we show how one can design and test the performance of next-generation quantum hardware -- by using existing quantum computers. Focusing on superconducting transmon processors as a prominent hardware platform, we compute the static and d…
Classical computers require large memory resources and computational power to simulate quantum circuits with a large number of qubits. Even supercomputers that can store huge amounts of data face a scalability issue in regard to parallel quantum computing simulations because of the latency of data movements between distributed memory spaces. Here, we apply a cache blocking technique by inserting swap gates in quantum circuits to decrease data movements. We implemented this technique in the open source simulation framework Qiskit Aer. We evaluated our simulator on GPU clusters and observed good…
A major milestone in the era of noisy intermediate scale quantum computers is \textit{quantum supremacy} [Nature \textbf{574}, 505 (2019)] claimed on the Sycamore quantum processor of $53$ qubits, which can perform a random circuit sampling task within $200$ seconds while the same task is estimated to require a runtime of $10,000$ years on Summit. This record has been renewed with two recent experiments on the Zuchongzhi $2.0$ ($56$ qubits) and Zuchongzhi $2.1$ ($60$ qubits) quantum processors. On the other front of quantum supremacy comparison, there has also been continuous improvements on b…
Quantum computational chemistry (QCC) is the use of quantum computers to solve problems in computational quantum chemistry. We develop a high performance variational quantum eigensolver (VQE) simulator for simulating quantum computational chemistry problems on a new Sunway supercomputer. The major innovations include: (1) a Matrix Product State (MPS) based VQE simulator to reduce the amount of memory needed and increase the simulation efficiency; (2) a combination of the Density Matrix Embedding Theory with the MPS-based VQE simulator to further extend the simulation range; (3) A three-level p…
Users of quantum computers must be able to confirm they are indeed functioning as intended, even when the devices are remotely accessed. In particular, if the Hilbert space dimension of the components are not as advertised -- for instance if the qubits suffer leakage -- errors can ensue and protocols may be rendered insecure. We refine the method of delayed vectors, adapted from classical chaos theory to quantum systems, and apply it remotely on the IBMQ platform -- a quantum computer composed of transmon qubits. The method witnesses, in a model-independent fashion, dynamical signatures of hig…
Quantum computers can potentially achieve an exponential speedup versus classical computers on certain computational tasks, as recently demonstrated in systems of superconducting qubits. However, these qubits have large footprints due to their large capacitor electrodes needed to suppress losses by avoiding dielectric materials. This tactic hinders scaling by increasing parasitic coupling among circuit components, degrading individual qubit addressability, and limiting the spatial density of qubits. Here, we take advantage of the unique properties of the van der Waals (vdW) materials to reduce…
A common approach to realize conditional-phase (CZ) gates in transmon qubits relies on flux control of the qubit frequency to make computational states interact with non-computational ones using a fast-adiabatic trajectory to minimize leakage. We develop a bipolar flux-pulsing method with two key advantages over the traditional unipolar variant. First, the action of the bipolar pulse is robust to long-timescale linear-dynamical distortions in the flux-control line, facilitating tuneup and ensuring atomic repeatability. Second, the flux symmetry of the transmon Hamiltonian makes the conditional…
Quantum gates, which are the essential building blocks of quantum computers, are very fragile. Thus, to realize robust quantum gates with high fidelity is the ultimate goal of quantum manipulation. Here, we propose a nonadiabatic geometric quantum computation scheme on superconducting circuits to engineer arbitrary quantum gates, which share both the robust merit of geometric phases and the capacity to combine with optimal control technique to further enhance the gate robustness. Specifically, in our proposal, arbitrary geometric single-qubit gates can be realized on a transmon qubit, by a res…
We introduce QuEST, the Quantum Exact Simulation Toolkit, and compare it to ProjectQ, qHipster and a recent distributed implementation of Quantum++. QuEST is the first open source, OpenMP and MPI hybridised, GPU accelerated simulator of universal quantum circuits. Embodied as a C library, it is designed so that a user's code can be deployed seamlessly to any platform from a laptop to a supercomputer. QuEST is capable of simulating generic quantum circuits of general single-qubit gates and multi-qubit controlled gates, on pure and mixed states, represented as state-vectors and density matrices,…
High-fidelity single- and two-qubit gates are essential building blocks for a fault-tolerant quantum computer. While there has been much progress in suppressing single-qubit gate errors in superconducting qubit systems, two-qubit gates still suffer from error rates that are orders of magnitude higher. One limiting factor is the residual ZZ-interaction, which originates from a coupling between computational states and higher-energy states. While this interaction is usually viewed as a nuisance, here we experimentally demonstrate that it can be exploited to produce a universal set of fast single…
We extensively test a recent protocol to demonstrate quantum fault tolerance on three systems: (1) a real-time simulation of five spin qubits coupled to an environment with two-level defects, (2) a real-time simulation of transmon quantum computers, and (3) the 16-qubit processor of the IBM Q Experience. In the simulations, the dynamics of the full system is obtained by numerically solving the time-dependent Schrödinger equation. We find that the fault-tolerant scheme provides a systematic way to improve the results when the errors are dominated by the inherent control and measurement errors p…
The recently reported experimental results claiming "quantum supremacy" achieved by Google quantum device are critically discussed. The Google team constructed a quantum chaotic system based on Josephson junction technology which cannot be reliably simulated by the present day supercomputers. However, the similar "supremacy" can be realized for properly designed micro-mechanical devices, like periodically forced Duffing oscillator, using the available technology of quartz clocks. It is also reminded that classical and quantum chaotic systems behave in a similar way. Therefore, in this case, on…
Superconducting qubits are among the most promising platforms for building a quantum computer. However, individual qubit coherence times are not far past the scalability threshold for quantum error correction, meaning that millions of physical devices would be required to construct a useful quantum computer. Consequently, further increases in coherence time are very desirable. In this letter, we blueprint a simple circuit consisting of two transmon qubits and two additional lossy qubits or resonators, which is passively protected against all single qubit quantum error channels through a combin…
High-performance two-qubit gates have been reported with superconducting qubits coupled via a single-transmon coupler (STC). Most of them are implemented for qubits with a small detuning since reducing residual $ZZ$ coupling for highly detuned qubits by an STC is challenging. In terms of the frequency crowding and crosstalk, however, highly detuned qubits are desirable. Here, we numerically demonstrate a high-performance parametric gate for highly detuned fixed-frequency qubits using a recently proposed tunable coupler called a double-transmon coupler (DTC). Applying an ac flux pulse, we can p…
