Error mitigation extends the computational reach of a noisy quantum processor

By Abhinav Kandala, Kristan Temme, A. C'orcoles, Antonio Mezzacapo, Jerry M. Chow, Jay M. Gambetta. Nature, 2018

893 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Quantum computation, a paradigm of computing that is completely different from classical methods, benefits from theoretically proved speed-ups for certain problems and can be used to study the properties of quantum systems1. Yet, because of the inherently fragile nature of the physical computing elements (qubits), achieving quantum advantages over classical computation requires extremely low error rates for qubit operations, as well as substantial physical qubits, to realize fault tolerance via quantum error correction2,3. However, recent theoretical work4,5 has shown that the accuracy of computation (based on expectation values of quantum observables) can be enhanced through an extrapolation of results from a collection of experiments of varying noise. Here we demonstrate this error mitigation protocol on a superconducting quantum processor, enhancing its computational capability, with no additional hardware modifications. We apply the protocol to mitigate errors in canonical single- and two-qubit experiments and then extend its application to the variational optimization6–8 of Hamiltonians for quantum chemistry and magnetism9. We effectively demonstrate that the suppression of incoherent errors helps to achieve an otherwise inaccessible level of accuracy in the variational solutions using our noisy processor. These results demonstrate that error mitigation techniques will enable substantial improvements in the capabilities of near-term quantum computing hardware. The accuracy of computations on noisy, near-term quantum systems can be enhanced by extrapolating results from experiments with various noise levels, without requiring additional hardware modifications.

Subfields: Artificial Intelligence, Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/0473787f881e9fac30f5809d9e92ddcad8eb1f3c

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In Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics

Citations in the corpus

Variational quantum algorithms (2020, background): “Data and plot adapted from [89].”
Suppression of Crosstalk in Superconducting Qubits Using Dynamical Decoupling (2021, neutral): “[10] Abhinav Kandala, Kristan Temme, Antonio D.”
Error mitigation with Clifford quantum-circuit data (2020, methodology): “[28].”
Quantum Simulators: Architectures and Opportunities (2019, background): “[116] Abhinav Kandala, Kristan Temme, Antonio D Córcoles, Antonio Mezzacapo, Jerry M Chow,”
Digital zero noise extrapolation for quantum error mitigation (2020, methodology): “While successfully used to suppress errors in single and two-qubit quantum programs on a superconducting quantum processor [16], timescaling has some disadvantages:”
The future of quantum computing with superconducting qubits (2022, methodology): “We can also measure the quantity of interest at several diﬀerent values of the noise rate and perform an extrapolation to the zero-noise limit 10,11,78 .”