No Arabic abstract
Estimating the features of noise is the first step in a chain of protocols that will someday lead to fault tolerant quantum computers. The randomised benchmarking (RB) protocol is designed with this exact mindset, estimating the average strength of noise in a quantum processor with relative ease in practice. However, RB, along with most other benchmarking and characterisation methods, is limited in scope because it assumes that the noise is temporally uncorrelated (Markovian), which is increasingly evident not to be the case. Here, we combine the RB protocol with a recent framework describing non-Markovian quantum phenomena to derive a general analytical expression of the average sequence fidelity (ASF) for non-Markovian RB with the Clifford group. We show that one can identify non-Markovian features of the noise directly from the ASF through its deviations from the Markovian case, proposing a set of methods to collectively estimate these deviations, non-Markovian memory time-scales, and diagnose (in)coherence of non-Markovian noise in an RB experiment. Finally, we demonstrate the efficacy of our proposal by means of several proof-of-principle examples. Our methods are directly implementable and pave the pathway to better understanding correlated noise in quantum processors.
With continuing improvements on the quality of fabricated quantum devices, it becomes increasingly crucial to analyze noisy quantum process in greater details such as characterizing the non-Markovianity in a quantitative manner. In this work, we propose an experimental protocol, termed Spectral Transfer Tensor Maps (SpecTTM), to accurately predict the RHP non-Markovian measure of any Pauli channels without state-preparation and measurement (SPAM) errors. In fact, for Pauli channels, SpecTTM even allows the reconstruction of highly-precised noise power spectrum for qubits. At last, we also discuss how SpecTTM can be useful to approximately characterize non-Markovianity of non-Pauli channels via Pauli twirling in an optimal basis.
The ping-pong protocol adapted for quantum key distribution is studied in the trusted quantum noise scenario, wherein the legitimate parties can add noise locally. For a well-studied attack model, we show how non-unital quantum non-Markovianity of the added noise can improve the key rate. We also point out that this noise-induced advantage cannot be obtained by Alice and Bob by adding local classical noise to their post-measurement data.
The non-Markovian nature of quantum systems recently turned to be a key subject for investigations on open quantum system dynamics. Many studies, from its theoretical grounding to its usefulness as a resource for quantum information processing and experimental demonstrations, have been reported in the literature. Typically, in these studies, a structured reservoir is required to make non-Markovian dynamics to emerge. Here, we investigate the dynamics of a qubit interacting with a bosonic bath and under the injection of a classical stochastic colored noise. A canonical Lindblad-like master equation for the system is derived, using the stochastic wavefunction formalism. Then, the non-Markovianity of the evolution is witnessed using the Andersson, Cresser, Hall and Li measure. We evaluate the measure for three different noises and study the interplay between environment and noise pump necessary to generate quantum non-Markovianity, as well as the energy balance of the system. Finally, we discuss the possibility to experimentally implement the proposed model.
Distilling precise estimates from noisy intermediate scale quantum (NISQ) data has recently attracted considerable attention. In order to augment digital qubit metrics, such as gate fidelity, we discuss analog error mitigability, i.e. the ability to accurately distill precise observable estimates, as a hybrid quantum-classical computing benchmarking task. Specifically, we characterize single qubit error rates on IBMs Poughkeepsie superconducting quantum hardware, incorporate control-mediated noise dependence into a generalized rescaling protocol, and analyze how noise characteristics influence Richardson extrapolation-based error mitigation. Our results identify regions in the space of Hamiltonian control fields and circuit-depth which are most amenable to reliable noise extrapolation, as well as shedding light on how low-level hardware characterization can be used as a predictive tool for uncertainty quantification in error mitigated NISQ computations.
It is by now well established that noise itself can be useful for performing quantum information processing tasks. We present results which show how one can effectively reduce the error rate associated with a noisy quantum channel, by counteracting its detrimental effects with another form of noise. In particular, we consider the effect of adding on top of a purely Markovian (Lindblad) dynamics, a more general form of dissipation, which we refer to as generalized-Markovian noise. This noise has an associated memory kernel and the resulting dynamics is described by an integro-differential equation. The overall dynamics are characterized by decay rates which depend not only on the original dissipative time-scales, but also on the new integral kernel. We find that one can engineer this kernel such that the overall rate of decay is lowered by the addition of this noise term. We illustrate this technique for the case where the bare noise is described by a dephasing Pauli channel. We analytically solve this model, and show that one can effectively double (or even triple) the length of the channel, whilst achieving the same fidelity, entanglement, and error threshold. We numerically verify this scheme can also be used to protect against thermal Markovian noise (at non-zero temperature), which models spontaneous emission and excitation processes. A physical interpretation of this scheme is discussed, whereby the added generalized-Markovian noise causes the system to become periodically decoupled from the background Markovian noise.