We report the observation and characterisation of a systematic error in the implementation of $U_3$ gates in the IBM quantum computers. The error appears as a consistent shift in one of the angles of the gate, whose magnitude does not correlate with IBM's cited errors calculated using Clifford randomized benchmarking. We propose a simple mitigation procedure, leading to an improvement in the observed value for the CHSH inequality, highlighting the utility of simple mitigation strategies for short-depth quantum circuits.
We introduce a volumetric benchmark for near-term quantum platforms based on the generation and verification of genuine entanglement across n-qubits using graph states and direct stabilizer measurements. Our benchmark evaluates the robustness of multipartite and bipartite n-qubit entanglement with respect to many sources of hardware noise: qubit decoherence, CNOT and swap gate noise, and readout error. We demonstrate our benchmark on multiple superconducting qubit platforms available from IBM (ibmq_belem, ibmq_toronto, ibmq_guadalupe and ibmq_jakarta). Subsets of $n<10$ qubits are used for gra…
Quantum state preparation by adiabatic evolution is currently rendered ineffective by the long implementation times of the underlying quantum circuits, comparable to the decoherence time of present and near-term quantum devices. These implementation times can be significantly reduced by realizing the evolution with a minimal number of customized gates. Employing a realistic model of a two-qubit processor, we carried out classical device-level simulations of the adiabatic evolution of a two-spin system implemented with customized two-qubit gates. These device-level simulations were compared wit…
In the current era of Noisy Intermediate-Scale Quantum (NISQ) technology, the practical use of quantum computers remains inhibited by our inability to aptly decouple qubits from their environment to mitigate computational errors. In this work, we introduce an approach by which knowledge of a qubit's initial quantum state and the standard parameters describing its decoherence can be leveraged to mitigate the noise present during the execution of a single-qubit gate. We benchmark our protocol using cloud-based access to IBM quantum processors. On ibmq_rome, we demonstrate a reduction of the sing…
The ability to generate large-scale entanglement is an important progenitor of quantum information processing capability in noisy intermediate-scale quantum (NISQ) devices. In this paper, we investigate the extent to which entangled quantum states over large numbers of qubits can be prepared on current superconducting quantum devices. We prepared native-graph states on the IBM Quantum 65-qubit $\textit{ibmq_manhattan}$ device and the 53-qubit $\textit{ibmq_rochester}$ device and applied quantum readout-error mitigation (QREM). Connected entanglement graphs spanning each of the full devices wer…
Crosstalk is a major source of noise in Noisy Intermediate-Scale Quantum (NISQ) systems and is a fundamental challenge for hardware design. When multiple instructions are executed in parallel, crosstalk between the instructions can corrupt the quantum state and lead to incorrect program execution. Our goal is to mitigate the application impact of crosstalk noise through software techniques. This requires (i) accurate characterization of hardware crosstalk, and (ii) intelligent instruction scheduling to serialize the affected operations. Since crosstalk characterization is computationally expen…
Mitigating errors is a significant challenge for near term quantum computers. One of the most important sources of errors is related to the readout of the quantum state into a classical bit stream. A variety of techniques have been proposed to mitigate these errors with post-hoc corrections. We propose a complementary scheme to actively reduce readout errors on a shot-by-shot basis by encoding single qubits, immediately prior to readout, into multi-qubit states. The computational resources of our technique are independent of the circuit depth and fully compatible with current hardware error ra…
Achieving near-term quantum advantage will require accurate estimation of quantum observables despite significant hardware noise. For this purpose, we propose a novel, scalable error-mitigation method that applies to gate-based quantum computers. The method generates training data $\{X_i^{\text{noisy}},X_i^{\text{exact}}\}$ via quantum circuits composed largely of Clifford gates, which can be efficiently simulated classically, where $X_i^{\text{noisy}}$ and $X_i^{\text{exact}}$ are noisy and noiseless observables respectively. Fitting a linear ansatz to this data then allows for the prediction…
An unknown unitary gates, which is secretly chosen from several known ones, can always be distinguished perfectly. In this paper, we implement such a task on IBM's quantum processor. More precisely, we experimentally demonstrate the discrimination of two qubit unitary gates, the identity gate and the $\frac{2}{3}π$-phase shift gate, using two discrimination schemes -- the parallel scheme and the sequential scheme. We program these two schemes on the \emph{ibmqx4}, a $5$-qubit superconducting quantum processor via IBM cloud, with the help of the $QSI$ modules [S. Liu et al.,~arXiv:1710.09500, 2…
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.
Experiments conducted on open-access cloud-based IBM Quantum devices are presented for characterizing their fault tolerance using $[4,2,2]$-encoded gate sequences. Up to 100 logical gates are activated in the IBMQ Bogota and IBMQ Santiago devices and we found that a $[4,2,2]$ code's logical gate set may be deemed fault-tolerant for gate sequences larger than 10 gates. However, certain circuits did not satisfy the fault tolerance criterion. In some cases, the encoded-gate sequences show a high error rate that is lower bounded at $\approx 0.1$, whereby the error inherent in these circuits cannot…
Two-qubit gates are important components of quantum computing. However, unwanted interactions between qubits (so-called parasitic gates) can be particularly problematic and degrade the performance of quantum applications. In this work, we present two software methods to mitigate parasitic two-qubit gate errors. The first approach is built upon the KAK decomposition and keeps the original unitary decomposition for the error-free native two-qubit gate. It counteracts a parasitic two-qubit gate by only applying single-qubit rotations and therefore has no two-qubit gate overhead. We show the optim…
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…
The field of quantum computing has experienced a rapid expansion in recent years, with ongoing exploration of new technologies, a decrease in error rates, and a growth in the number of qubits available in quantum processors. However, near-term quantum algorithms are still unable to be induced without compounding consequential levels of noise, leading to non-trivial erroneous results. Quantum Error Correction and Mitigation are rapidly advancing areas of research in the quantum computing landscape, with a goal of reducing errors. IBM has recently emphasized that Quantum Error Mitigation is the …
The Eastin-Knill theorem states that no quantum error correcting code can have a universal set of transversal gates. For CSS codes that can implement Clifford gates transversally it suffices to provide one additional non-Clifford gate, such as the T-gate, to achieve universality. Common methods to implement fault-tolerant T-gates like magic state distillation generate a significant hardware overhead that will likely prevent their practical usage in the near-term future. Recently methods have been developed to mitigate the effect of noise in shallow quantum circuits that are not protected by er…
Improving gate performance is vital for scalable quantum computing. The universal quantum computing also requires the gate fidelity to reach a high level. For superconducting quantum processor, which operates in the microwave band, the single-qubit gates are usually realized with microwave driving. The crosstalk between microwave pulses is a non-negligible error source. In this article, we propose an error mitigation scheme to address this crosstalk issue for single-qubit gates. There are three steps in our method. First, by controlling the detuning between qubits, the microwave induced classi…
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…
Zero noise extrapolation (ZNE) is a widely used technique for gate error mitigation on near term quantum computers because it can be implemented in software and does not require knowledge of the quantum computer noise parameters. Traditional ZNE requires a significant resource overhead in terms of quantum operations. A recent proposal using a targeted (or random) instead of fixed identity insertion method (RIIM versus FIIM) requires significantly fewer quantum gates for the same formal precision. We start by showing that RIIM can allow for ZNE to be deployed on deeper circuits than FIIM, but r…
Here we demonstrate quantum teleportation through hypergraph states, which are the generalization of graph states, and due to their non-local entanglement properties, it allows us to perform quantum teleportation. Here we design some hypergraph states useful for quantum teleportation and process the schemes for quantum teleportation of single-qubit and two-qubit arbitrary states via three-uniform three-qubit and four-qubit hypergraph states respectively. We explicate the experimental realization of quantum teleportation of both single and two-qubit arbitrary states. Then we run our quantum cir…
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…
We present a method to improve the convergence of variational algorithms based on hidden inverses to mitigate coherent errors. In the context of error mitigation, this means replacing the on hardware implementation of certain Hermitian gates with their inverses. Doing so results in noise cancellation and a more resilient quantum circuit. This approach improves performance in a variety of two-qubit error models where the noise operator also inverts with the gate inversion. We apply the mitigation scheme on superconducting quantum processors running the variational quantum eigensolver (VQE) algo…
One of the key challenges in current Noisy Intermediate-Scale Quantum (NISQ) computers is to control a quantum system with high-fidelity quantum gates. There are many reasons a quantum gate can go wrong -- for superconducting transmon qubits in particular, one major source of gate error is the unwanted crosstalk between neighboring qubits due to a phenomenon called frequency crowding. We motivate a systematic approach for understanding and mitigating the crosstalk noise when executing near-term quantum programs on superconducting NISQ computers. We present a general software solution to allevi…
To achieve the practical applications of near-term noisy quantum devices, low-cost ways to mitigate the noise damages in the devices are essential. In many applications, the noiseless state we want to prepare is often a pure state, which has recently inspired a range of purification-based quantum error mitigation proposals. The existing proposals either are limited to the suppressions of only the leading-order state preparation errors, or require a large number of long-range gates that might be challenging to implement depending on the qubit architecture. This article will provide an overview …
We introduce the quantum implementation of a binary classifier based on cosine similarity between data vectors. The proposed quantum algorithm evaluates the classifier on a set of data vectors with time complexity that is logarithmic in the product of the set cardinality and the dimension of the vectors. It is based just on a suitable state preparation like the retrieval from a QRAM, a SWAP test circuit (two Hadamard gates and one Fredkin gate), and a measurement process on a single qubit. Furthermore we present a simple implementation of the considered classifier on the IBM quantum processor …
Quantum systems have potential to demonstrate significant computational advantage, but current quantum devices suffer from the rapid accumulation of error that prevents the storage of quantum information over extended periods. The unintentional coupling of qubits to their environment and each other adds significant noise to computation, and improved methods to combat decoherence are required to boost the performance of quantum algorithms on real machines. While many existing techniques for mitigating error rely on adding extra gates to the circuit, calibrating new gates, or extending a circuit…
If NISQ-era quantum computers are to perform useful tasks, they will need to employ powerful error mitigation techniques. Quasi-probability methods can permit perfect error compensation at the cost of additional circuit executions, provided that the nature of the error model is fully understood and sufficiently local both spatially and temporally. Unfortunately these conditions are challenging to satisfy. Here we present a method by which the proper compensation strategy can instead be learned ab initio. Our training process uses multiple variants of the primary circuit where all non-Clifford …
Several techniques have been recently introduced to mitigate errors in near-term quantum computers without the overhead required by quantum error correcting codes. While most of the focus has been on gate errors, measurement errors are significantly larger than gate errors on some platforms. A widely used {\it transition matrix error mitigation} (TMEM) technique uses measured transition probabilities between initial and final classical states to correct subsequently measured data. However from a rigorous perspective, the noisy measurement should be calibrated with perfectly prepared initial st…
Crosstalk and several sources of operational interference are invisible when qubit or a gate is calibrated or benchmarked in isolation. These are unlocked during the execution of full quantum circuit applying entangling gates to several qubits simultaneously. Unwanted Z-Z coupling on superconducting cross-resonance CNOT gates, is a commonly occurring unitary crosstalk noise that severely limits the state fidelity. This work presents (1) method of tracing unitary errors, which exploits their sensitivity to the arrangement of CNOT gates in the circuit and (2) correction scheme that modifies orig…
Noisy Intermediate-Scale Quantum (NISQ) algorithms, which run on noisy quantum computers should be carefully designed to boost the output state fidelity. While several compilation approaches have been proposed to minimize circuit errors, they often omit the detailed circuit structure information that does not affect the circuit depth or the gate count. In the presence of spatial variation in the error rate of the quantum gates, adjusting the circuit structure can play a major role in mitigating errors. In this paper, we exploit the freedom of gate reordering based on the commutation rules to s…
Quantum system characterization techniques represent the front line in the identification and mitigation of noise in quantum computing, but can be expensive in terms of quantum resources and time to repeatedly employ. Another challenging aspect is that parameters governing the performance of various operations tend to drift over time, and monitoring these is hence a difficult task. One of the most promising characterization techniques, gate set tomography (GST), provides a self-consistent estimate of the completely positive, trace-preserving (CPTP) maps for a complete set of gates, as well as …
The exact number of CNOT and single qubit gates needed to implement a Quantum Algorithm in a given architecture is one of the central problems of Quantum Computation. In this work we study the importance of concise realizations of Partially defined Unitary Transformations for better circuit construction using the case study of Dicke State Preparation. The Dicke States $(\left|D^n_k \right>)$ are an important class of entangled states with uses in many branches of Quantum Information. In this regard we provide the most efficient Deterministic Dicke State Preparation Circuit in terms of CNOT and…
It is vital to minimise the impact of errors for near-future quantum devices that will lack the resources for full fault tolerance. Two quantum error mitigation (QEM) techniques have been introduced recently, namely error extrapolation [Li2017,Temme2017] and quasi-probability decomposition [Temme2017]. To enable practical implementation of these ideas, here we account for the inevitable imperfections in the experimentalist's knowledge of the error model itself. We describe a protocol for systematically measuring the effect of errors so as to design efficient QEM circuits. We find that the effe…
Medium-scale quantum devices that integrate about hundreds of physical qubits are likely to be developed in the near future. However, such devices will lack the resources for realizing quantum fault tolerance. Therefore, the main challenge of exploring the advantage of quantum computation is to minimize the impact of device and control imperfections without encoding. Quantum error mitigation is a solution satisfying the requirement. Here, we demonstrate an error mitigation protocol based on gate set tomography and quasiprobability decomposition. One- and two-qubit circuits are tested on a supe…
