No Arabic abstract
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 of the different purification-based quantum error mitigation schemes and propose a resource-efficient scheme that can correct state preparation errors up to any order while requiring only half of the qubits and less than half of the long-range gates compared to before.
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 gates are substituted with gates that are efficient to simulate classically. The process yields a configuration that is near-optimal versus noise in the real system with its non-Clifford gate set. Having presented a range of learning strategies, we demonstrate the power of the technique both with real quantum hardware (IBM devices) and exactly-emulated imperfect quantum computers. The systems suffer a range of noise severities and types, including spatially and temporally correlated variants. In all cases the protocol successfully adapts to the noise and mitigates it to a high degree.
We give a review on entanglement purification for bipartite and multipartite quantum states, with the main focus on theoretical work carried out by our group in the last couple of years. We discuss entanglement purification in the context of quantum communication, where we emphasize its close relation to quantum error correction. Various bipartite and multipartite entanglement purification protocols are discussed, and their performance under idealized and realistic conditions is studied. Several applications of entanglement purification in quantum communication and computation are presented, which highlights the fact that entanglement purification is a fundamental tool in quantum information processing.
A general method to mitigate the effect of errors in quantum circuits is outlined. The method is developed in sight of characteristics that an ideal method should possess and to ameliorate an existing method which only mitigates state preparation and measurement errors. The method is tested on different IBM Q quantum devices, using randomly generated circuits with up to four qubits. A large majority of results show significant error mitigation.
Contemporary quantum computers have relatively high levels of noise, making it difficult to use them to perform useful calculations, even with a large number of qubits. Quantum error correction is expected to eventually enable fault-tolerant quantum computation at large scales, but until then it will be necessary to use alternative strategies to mitigate the impact of errors. We propose a near-term friendly strategy to mitigate errors by entangling and measuring $M$ copies of a noisy state $rho$. This enables us to estimate expectation values with respect to a state with dramatically reduced error, $rho^M/ mathrm{Tr}(rho^M)$, without explicitly preparing it, hence the name virtual distillation. As $M$ increases, this state approaches the closest pure state to $rho$, exponentially quickly. We analyze the effectiveness of virtual distillation and find that it is governed in many regimes by the behavior of this pure state (corresponding to the dominant eigenvector of $rho$). We numerically demonstrate that virtual distillation is capable of suppressing errors by multiple orders of magnitude and explain how this effect is enhanced as the system size grows. Finally, we show that this technique can improve the convergence of randomized quantum algorithms, even in the absence of device noise.
Even with the recent rapid developments in quantum hardware, noise remains the biggest challenge for the practical applications of any near-term quantum devices. Full quantum error correction cannot be implemented in these devices due to their limited scale. Therefore instead of relying on engineered code symmetry, symmetry verification was developed which uses the inherent symmetry within the physical problem we try to solve. In this article, we develop a general framework named symmetry expansion which provides a wide spectrum of symmetry-based error mitigation schemes beyond symmetry verification, enabling us to achieve different balances between the estimation bias and the sampling cost of the scheme. We show that certain symmetry expansion schemes can achieve a smaller estimation bias than symmetry verification through cancellation between the biases due to the detectable and undetectable noise components. A practical way to search for such a small-bias scheme is introduced. By numerically simulating the Fermi-Hubbard model for energy estimation, the small-bias symmetry expansion we found can achieve an estimation bias 6 to 9 times below what is achievable by symmetry verification when the average number of circuit errors is between 1 to 2. The corresponding sampling cost for random shot noise reduction is just 2 to 6 times higher than symmetry verification. Beyond symmetries inherent to the physical problem, our formalism is also applicable to engineered symmetries. For example, the recent scheme for exponential error suppression using multiple noisy copies of the quantum device is just a special case of symmetry expansion using the permutation symmetry among the copies.