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arXiv:1508.06312 · Physical Review A

Characterizing universal gate sets via dihedral benchmarking

Arnaud Carignan-Dugas, Joel J. Wallman, Joseph Emerson

Published Dec 28, 2015• 97 citations
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Abstract

We describe a practical experimental protocol for robustly characterizing the error rates of non-Clifford gates associated with dihedral groups, including small single-qubit rotations. Our dihedral benchmarking protocol is a generalization of randomized benchmarking that relaxes the usual unitary 2-design condition. Combining this protocol with existing randomized benchmarking schemes enables practical universal gate sets for quantum information processing to be characterized in a way that is robust against state-preparation and measurement errors. In particular, our protocol enables direct benchmarking of the $\ensuremath{\pi}/8$ gate even under the gate-dependent error model that is expected in leading approaches to fault-tolerant quantum computation.

DOI
10.1103/physreva.92.060302

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We describe a practical experimental protocol for robustly characterizing the error rates of non-Clifford gates associated with dihedral groups, including small single-qubit rotations. Our dihedral benchmarking protocol is a generalization of randomized benchmarking that relaxes the usual unitary 2-design condition. Combining this protocol with existing randomized benchmarking schemes enables practical universal gate sets for quantum information processing to be characterized in a way that is robust against state-preparation and measurement errors. In particular, our protocol enables direct benchmarking of the \ensuremathπ/8\ensuremath{\pi}/8\ensuremathπ/8 gate even under the gate-dependent error model that is expected in leading approaches to fault-tolerant quantum computation.
Characterization of experimental systems is an essential step in developing and improving quantum hardware. A collection of protocols known as Randomized Benchmarking (RB) was developed in the past decade, which provides an efficient way to measure error rates in quantum systems. In a recent paper (arxiv:2010.07974), a general framework for RB was proposed, which encompassed most of the known RB protocols and overcame the limitation on error models in previous works. However, even this general framework has a restriction: it can only be applied to a finite group of gates. This does not meet the need posed by experiments, in particular the demand for benchmarking non-Clifford gates and continuous gate sets on quantum devices. In this work we generalize the RB framework to continuous groups of gates and show that as long as the noise level is reasonably small, the output can be approximated as a linear combination of matrix exponential decays. As an application, we numerically study the fully randomized benchmarking protocol (i.e. RB with the entire unitary group as the gate set) enabled by our proof. This provides a unified way to estimate the gate fidelity for any quantum gate in an experiment.
Randomized benchmarking is routinely used as an efficient method for characterizing the performance of sets of elementary logic gates in small quantum devices. In the measurement-based model of quantum computation, logic gates are implemented via single-site measurements on a fixed universal resource state. Here we adapt the randomized benchmarking protocol for a single qubit to a linear cluster state computation, which provides partial, yet efficient characterization of the noise associated with the target gate set. Applying randomized benchmarking to measurement-based quantum computation exhibits an interesting interplay between the inherent randomness associated with logic gates in the measurement-based model and the random gate sequences used in benchmarking. We consider two different approaches: the first makes use of the standard single-qubit Clifford group, while the second uses recently introduced (non-Clifford) measurement-based 2-designs, which harness inherent randomness to implement gate sequences.
Randomized benchmarking (RB) protocols are the most widely used methods for assessing the performance of quantum gates.However, the existing RB methods either do not scale to many qubits or cannot benchmark a universal gate set.Here, we introduce and demonstrate a technique for scalable RB of many universal and continuously parametrized gate sets, using a class of circuits called randomized mirror circuits.Our technique can be applied to a gate set containing an entangling Clifford gate and the set of arbitrary single-qubit gates, as well as gate sets containing controlled rotations about the Pauli axes.We use our technique to benchmark universal gate sets on four qubits of the Advanced Quantum Testbed, including a gate set containing a controlled-S gate and its inverse, and we investigate how the observed error rate is impacted by the inclusion of non-Clifford gates.Finally, we demonstrate that our technique scales to many qubits with experiments on a 27-qubit IBM Q processor.We use our technique to quantify the impact of crosstalk on this 27-qubit device, and we find that it contributes approximately 2=3 of the total error per gate in random many-qubit circuit layers.
Abstract Randomized benchmarking is an important protocol for robustly characterizing the error rates of quantum gates. The technique is typically applied to the Clifford gates since they form a group that satisfies a convenient technical condition of forming a unitary 2-design, in addition to having a tight connection to fault-tolerant quantum computing and an efficient classical simulation. In order to achieve universal quantum computing one must add at least one additional gate such as the T gate (also known as the π /8 gate). Here we propose and analyze a simple variation of the standard interleaved RB protocol that can accurately estimate the average fidelity of the T gate while retaining the many advantages of a unitary 2-design and the fidelity guarantees that such a design delivers, as well as the efficient classical simulation property of the Clifford group. Our work complements prior methods that have succeeded in estimating T gate fidelities, but only by relaxing the 2-design constraint and using a more complicated data analysis.
Abstract We aim to establish a scalable scheme for characterising diagonal non-Clifford gates for single- and multi-qudit systems; d is a prime-power integer. By employing cyclic operators and a qudit T gate, we generalise the dihedral benchmarking scheme for single- and multi-qudit circuits. Our results establish a path for experimentally benchmarking qudit systems and are of theoretical and experimental interest because our scheme is optimal insofar as it does not require preparation of the full qudit Clifford gate set to characterise a non-Clifford gate. Moreover, combined with Clifford randomised benchmarking, our scheme is useful to characterise the generators of a universal gate set.
We provide a comprehensive analysis of the differences between two important standards for randomized benchmarking (RB): the Clifford-group RB protocol proposed originally in Emerson et al. [J. Opt. B 7, S347 (2005)] and Dankert et al. [Phys. Rev. A 80, 012304 (2009)], and a variant of that RB protocol proposed by the NIST group in Knill et al. [Phys. Rev. A 77, 012307 (2008)]. While these two protocols are frequently conflated or presumed equivalent, we prove that they produce distinct exponential fidelity decays leading to differences of up to a factor of 3 in the estimated error rates under experimentally realistic conditions. These differences arise because the NIST RB protocol does not satisfy the unitary two-design condition for the twirl in the Clifford-group protocol and thus the decay rate depends on noninvariant features of the error model. Our analysis provides an important first step toward developing definitive standards for benchmarking quantum gates and a more rigorous theoretical underpinning for the NIST protocol and other RB protocols lacking a group-structure. We conclude by discussing the potential impact of these differences for estimating fault-tolerant overheads.