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arXiv:1904.11935 · Physical Review A

Detector tomography on IBM quantum computers and mitigation of an imperfect measurement

Yanzhu Chen, Maziar Farahzad, Shinjae Yoo, Tzu-Chieh Wei

Published Nov 13, 2019• 134 citations
arXivHTMLPDF

Abstract

We use quantum detector tomography to characterize the qubit readout in terms of measurement positive operator-valued measures (POVMs) on IBM quantum computers IBM Q 5 Tenerife and IBM Q 5 Yorktown. Our results suggest that the characterized detector model deviates from the ideal projectors, ranging from 10 to 40%. This is mostly dominated by classical errors, evident from the shrinkage of arrows from the poles in the corresponding Bloch-vector representations. There are also small deviations that are not ``classical,'' of order 3% or less, represented by the tilt of the arrows from the $z$ axis. Further improvement on this characterization can be made by adopting two- or more-qubit detector models instead of independent single-qubit detectors for all the qubits in one device. We also find evidence indicating correlations in the detector behavior, i.e., the detector characterization is slightly altered (to a few percent) when other qubits and their detectors are in operation. Such peculiar behavior is consistent with characterization from the more sophisticated approach of the gate set tomography. We also discuss how the characterized detectors' POVMs, despite deviation from the ideal projectors, can be used to estimate the ideal detection distribution.

DOI
10.1103/physreva.100.052315

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We use quantum detector tomography to characterize the qubit readout in terms of measurement positive operator-valued measures (POVMs) on IBM quantum computers IBM Q 5 Tenerife and IBM Q 5 Yorktown. Our results suggest that the characterized detector model deviates from the ideal projectors, ranging from 10 to 40%. This is mostly dominated by classical errors, evident from the shrinkage of arrows from the poles in the corresponding Bloch-vector representations. There are also small deviations that are not ``classical,'' of order 3% or less, represented by the tilt of the arrows from the zzz axis. Further improvement on this characterization can be made by adopting two- or more-qubit detector models instead of independent single-qubit detectors for all the qubits in one device. We also find evidence indicating correlations in the detector behavior, i.e., the detector characterization is slightly altered (to a few percent) when other qubits and their detectors are in operation. Such peculiar behavior is consistent with characterization from the more sophisticated approach of the gate set tomography. We also discuss how the characterized detectors' POVMs, despite deviation from the ideal projectors, can be used to estimate the ideal detection distribution.
We propose a simple scheme to reduce readout errors in experiments on quantum systems with finite number of measurement outcomes. Our method relies on performing classical post-processing which is preceded by Quantum Detector Tomography, i.e., the reconstruction of a Positive-Operator Valued Measure (POVM) describing the given quantum measurement device. If the measurement device is affected only by an invertible classical noise, it is possible to correct the outcome statistics of future experiments performed on the same device. To support the practical applicability of this scheme for near-term quantum devices, we characterize measurements implemented in IBM's and Rigetti's quantum processors. We find that for these devices, based on superconducting transmon qubits, classical noise is indeed the dominant source of readout errors. Moreover, we analyze the influence of the presence of coherent errors and finite statistics on the performance of our error-mitigation procedure. Applying our scheme on the IBM's 5-qubit device, we observe a significant improvement of the results of a number of single- and two-qubit tasks including Quantum State Tomography (QST), Quantum Process Tomography (QPT), the implementation of non-projective measurements, and certain quantum algorithms (Grover's search and the Bernstein-Vazirani algorithm). Finally, we present results showing improvement for the implementation of certain probability distributions in the case of five qubits.
We propose a simple scheme to reduce readout errors in experiments on quantum systems with finite number of measurement outcomes. Our method relies on performing classical post-processing which is preceded by Quantum Detector Tomography, i.e., the reconstruction of a Positive-Operator Valued Measure (POVM) describing the given quantum measurement device. If the measurement device is affected only by an invertible classical noise, it is possible to correct the outcome statistics of future experiments performed on the same device. To support the practical applicability of this scheme for near-term quantum devices, we characterize measurements implemented in IBM's and Rigetti's quantum processors. We find that for these devices, based on superconducting transmon qubits, classical noise is indeed the dominant source of readout errors. Moreover, we analyze the influence of the presence of coherent errors and finite statistics on the performance of our error-mitigation procedure. Applying our scheme on the IBM's 5-qubit device, we observe a significant improvement of the results of a number of single- and two-qubit tasks including Quantum State Tomography (QST), Quantum Process Tomography (QPT), the implementation of non-projective measurements, and certain quantum algorithms (Grover's search and the Bernstein-Vazirani algorithm). Finally, we present results showing improvement for the implementation of certain probability distributions in the case of five qubits.
Readout errors contribute significantly to the overall noise affecting present-day quantum computers. However, the complete characterization of generic readout noise is infeasible for many-qubit devices. Here we introduce an appropriately tailored quantum detector tomography protocol, the so-called quantum detector overlapping tomography (QDOT), which enables efficient (i.e. with complexity scaling logarithmically with the total number of qubits) characterization of [Formula: see text]-local cross-talk effects in the readout noise. We show that QDOT data provides information about suitably defined reduced POVM operators, correlations and coherences in the readout noise, as well as allows to reconstruct the correlated clusters and neighbours readout noise model. Benchmarks are introduced to verify utility and accuracy of the reconstructed model. We apply our method to investigate cross-talk effects on 79-qubit Rigetti and 127-qubit IBM devices. We discuss their readout noise characteristics, and demonstrate effectiveness of our approach by showing superior performance of correlated clusters and neighbours over models without cross-talk in model-based readout error mitigation applied to energy estimation of MAX-2-SAT Hamiltonians, with the improvement on the order of 20% for both devices.
We propose an estimation method for quantum measurement tomography (QMT) based on semidefinite programming (SDP) and discuss how it may be employed to detect experimental imperfections, such as shot noise and/or faulty preparation of the input states on near-term quantum computers. Moreover, if the positive operator-valued measure (POVM) we aim to characterize is informationally complete, we put forward a method for self-consistent tomography, i.e., for recovering a set of input states and POVM effects that is consistent with the experimental outcomes and does not assume any a priori knowledge about the input states of the tomography. Contrary to many methods that have been discussed in the literature, our approach does not rely on additional assumptions such as low noise or the existence of a reliable subset of input states.
We present adaptive measurement techniques tailored for variational quantum algorithms on near-term small and noisy devices. In particular, we generalise earlier "learning to measure" strategies in two ways. First, by considering a class of adaptive positive operator valued measures (POVMs) that can be simulated with simple projective measurements without ancillary qubits, we decrease the amount of required qubits and two-qubit gates. Second, by introducing a method based on Quantum Detector Tomography to mitigate the effect of noise, we are able to optimise the POVMs as well as to infer expectation values reliably in the currently available noisy quantum devices. Our numerical simulations clearly indicate that the presented strategies can significantly reduce the number of needed shots to achieve chemical accuracy in variational quantum eigensolvers, thus helping to solve one of the bottlenecks of near-term quantum computing.
Debugging quantum states transformations is an important task of modern quantum computing. The use of quantum tomography for these purposes significantly expands the range of possibilities. However, the presence of preparation and measurement errors complicates the practical use of this procedure. In this work, we investigate the possibility of estimating these errors from experiment. These estimates are subsequently used to build a robust quantum tomography model. The model allows one to accurately reconstruct unitary errors of single-qubit gates. We show that, having such imperfect single-qubit gates with pre-estimated errors, one can obtain transformations close to ideal ones. A similar approach can also significantly mitigate single-qubit gates cross-talk.