No Arabic abstract
As a wide variety of quantum computing platforms become available, methods for assessing and comparing the performance of these devices are of increasing interest and importance. Inspired by the success of single-qubit error rate computations for tracking the progress of gate-based quantum computers, this work proposes a Quantum Annealing Single-qubit Assessment (QASA) protocol for quantifying the performance of individual qubits in quantum annealing computers. The proposed protocol scales to large quantum annealers with thousands of qubits and provides unique insights into the distribution of qubit properties within a particular hardware device. The efficacy of the QASA protocol is demonstrated by analyzing the properties of a D-Wave 2000Q system, revealing unanticipated correlations in the qubit performance of that device. A study repeating the QASA protocol at different annealing times highlights how the method can be utilized to understand the impact of annealing parameters on qubit performance. Overall, the proposed QASA protocol provides a useful tool for assessing the performance of current and emerging quantum annealing devices.
As a variety of quantum computing models and platforms become available, methods for assessing and comparing the performance of these devices are of increasing interest and importance. Despite being built of the same fundamental computational unit, radically different approaches have emerged for characterizing the performance of qubits in gate-based and quantum annealing computers, limiting and complicating consistent cross-platform comparisons. To fill this gap, this work proposes a single-qubit protocol (Q-RBPN) for measuring some basic performance characteristics of individual qubits in both models of quantum computation. The proposed protocol scales to large quantum computers with thousands of qubits and provides insights into the distribution of qubit properties within a particular hardware device and across families of devices. The efficacy of the Q-RBPN protocol is demonstrated through the analysis of more than 300 gate-based qubits spanning eighteen machines and 2000 annealing-based qubits from one machine, revealing some unexpected differences in qubit performance. Overall, the proposed Q-RBPN protocol provides a new platform-agnostic tool for assessing the performance of a wide range of emerging quantum computing devices.
An overview of current status and prospects of the development of quantum computer hardware based on inorganic crystals doped with rare-earth ions is presented. Major parts of the experimental work in this area has been done in two places, Canberra, Australia and Lund, Sweden, and the present description follows more closely the Lund work. Techniques will be described that include optimal filtering of the initially inhomogeneously broadened profile down to well separated and narrow ensembles, as well as the use of advanced pulse-shaping in order to achieve robust arbitrary single-qubit operations with fidelities above 90%, as characterized by quantum state tomography. It is expected that full scalability of these systems will require the ability to determine the state of single rare-earth ions. It has been proposed that this can be done using special readout ions doped into the crystal and an update is given on the work to find and characterize such ions. Finally, a few aspects on the possibilities for remote entanglement of ions in separate rare-earth-ion-doped crystals are considered.
Satisfiability filters, introduced by S. A. Weaver et al. in 2014, are a new and promising type of filters to address set membership testing. In order to construct satisfiability filters, it is necessary to find disparate solutions to hard random $k$-SAT problems. This paper compares simulated annealing, simulated quantum annealing and walkSAT, an open-source SAT solver, in terms of their ability to find such solutions. The results indicate that solutions found by simulated quantum annealing are generally less disparate than solutions found by the other solvers and therefore less useful for the construction of satisfiability filters.
The accurate implementation of quantum gates is essential for the realisation of quantum algorithms and digital quantum simulations. This accuracy may be increased on noisy hardware through the variational optimisation of gates, however the experimental realisation of such a protocol is impeded by the large effort required to estimate the fidelity of an implemented gate. With a hierarchy of approximations we find a faithful approximation to the quantum process fidelity that can be estimated experimentally with reduced effort. Its practical use is demonstrated with the optimisation of a three-qubit quantum gate on a commercially available quantum processor.
Scaling the number of qubits while maintaining high-fidelity quantum gates remains a key challenge for quantum computing. Presently, superconducting quantum processors with >50-qubits are actively available. For such systems, fixed-frequency transmons are attractive due to their long coherence and noise immunity. However, scaling fixed-frequency architectures proves challenging due to precise relative frequency requirements. Here we employ laser annealing to selectively tune transmon qubits into desired frequency patterns. Statistics over hundreds of annealed qubits demonstrate an empirical tuning precision of 18.5 MHz, with no measurable impact on qubit coherence. We quantify gate error statistics on a tuned 65-qubit processor, with median two-qubit gate fidelity of 98.7%. Baseline tuning statistics yield a frequency-equivalent resistance precision of 4.7 MHz, sufficient for high-yield scaling beyond 1000-qubit levels. Moving forward, we anticipate selective laser annealing to play a central role in scaling fixed-frequency architectures.