Quantum computational experiments exploiting Noisy Intermediate-Scale Quantum (NISQ) devices to demonstrate violation of a Bell inequality are proposed. They consist of running specified quantum algorithms on few-qubit computers. If such a device assures entanglement and performs single-shot measurements, the detection loophole is avoided. Four concise quantum circuits determining the expectation values of the relevant observables are used for a two-qubit system. It is possible to add an ancilla qubit to these circuits and eventually only measure the ancilla to obtain the relevant information. For a four-qubit NISQ computer, two algorithms yielding the same averages, however also guaranteeing a random choice of the observable, are developed. A freedom-of-choice loophole is therefore avoided. Including an additional ancilla reduces the number of measurements by one since in this case only the ancillas need to be measured. Note that these methods, using the NISQ device, are intrinsically quantum mechanical. Locality loopholes cannot be excluded on present NISQ systems. Results of simulations on the QX simulator of Quantum Inspire are presented. The Bell inequality is indeed found to be violated, even if some additional noise is included by means of the depolarizing channel error model. The algorithms have been implemented on the IBM Q Experience as well. The results of these quantum computations support a violation of the Bell inequality by various standard deviations.
Quantum computational experiments exploiting Noisy Intermediate-Scale Quantum (NISQ) devices to demonstrate violation of a Bell inequality are proposed. They consist of running specified quantum algorithms on few-qubit computers. If such a device assures entanglement and performs single-shot measurements, the detection loophole is avoided. Four concise quantum circuits determining the expectation values of the relevant observables are used for a two-qubit system. It is possible to add an ancilla qubit to these circuits and eventually only measure the ancilla to obtain the relevant information. For a four-qubit NISQ computer, two algorithms yielding the same averages, however also guaranteeing a random choice of the observable, are developed. A freedom-of-choice loophole is therefore avoided. Including an additional ancilla reduces the number of measurements by one since in this case only the ancillas need to be measured. Note that these methods, using the NISQ device, are intrinsically quantum mechanical. Locality loopholes cannot be excluded on present NISQ systems. Results of simulations on the QX simulator of Quantum Inspire are presented. The Bell inequality is indeed found to be violated, even if some additional noise is included by means of the depolarizing channel error model. The algorithms have been implemented on the IBM Q Experience as well. The results of these quantum computations support a violation of the Bell inequality by various standard deviations.
Noisy Intermediate-Scale Quantum computers are expected to be available this year. It is proposed to exploit such a device for decision making under uncertainty. The probabilistic character of quantum mechanics reflects this uncertainty. Concomitantly, the noise may add to it. The approach is standard in the sense that Bayes decision rule is used to decide on the basis of maximum expected reward. The novelty is to model the various action profiles and the development of `nature' as unitary transformations on a set of qubits. Measurement eventually yields samples of classical binary random variables in which the reward function has to be expressed. In order to achieve sufficiently low variances for reliable decision making more runs of such a quantum algorithm are necessary. Some simple examples have been worked out to elucidate the idea. Here the calculations are still analytically feasible. Presently lacking an operating quantum device, the QX simulator of Quantum Inspire has been used to generate the necessary samples for comparison and demonstration. First obtained results are promising and point at a possible useful application for noisy intermediate-scale quantum computers.
The advent of noisy intermediate-scale quantum (NISQ) devices has not only opened up new possibilities to studying quantum computational benefits, but it has also presented new challenges associated with noise and short coherence times. Entanglement is one of the inherent resources that can be used to perform quantum computation and implement the performance and reliability of quantum algorithms. This paper looks at entanglement dynamics in NISQ machines subjected to natural noises. The study focuses on the problem of examining the role of various noise channels in the creation, dynamics, and decay of the entanglement during quantum operations, such as depolarizing, amplitude damping, and phase damping. The study is based on theoretical modeling and numerical simulations of multi-qubit quantum circuits to determine the stability of entangled states with respect to circuit depth and intensity of noise. Concurrence and von Neumann entropy are examples of entanglement measures that are used to characterize correlations between qubits as well as to trace the dynamics of these correlations across computational interactions. The results show that noise has major impacts on entanglement distribution, which tends to cause rapid decays in highly entangled states with increase in circuit complexity. The findings, however, also show that there are some circuit architectures and error-mitigation schemes that can somewhat sustain entanglement with moderate levels of noise. The paper also emphasizes the relevance of minimalizing sequence of gates, and reduced circuit depth in an effort to preserve useful entanglement in present-day quantum hardware. These observations help in understanding the behaviour of quantum correlations better in real world quantum devices and provide a way of developing more resilient quantum algorithms that would work on NISQ systems. In general, the article offers a systematic view on entanglement behavior in disordered quantum systems and highlights its value in the development of quantum computing applications in the near term.
This work provides quantitative tests of the extent of violation of two inequalities applicable to qubits coupled into Bell states, using IBM's publicly accessible quantum computers. Violations of the inequalities are well established. Our purpose is not to test the inequalities, but rather to determine how well quantum mechanical predictions can be reproduced on quantum computers, given their current fault rates. We present results for the spin projections of two entangled qubits, along three axes A, B, and C, with a fixed angle θ between A and B and a range of angles θ' between B and C. For any classical object that can be characterized by three observables with two possible values, inequalities govern relationships among the probabilities of outcomes for the observables, taken pairwise. From set theory, these inequalities must be satisfied by all such classical objects; but quantum systems may violate the inequalities. We have detected clear-cut violations of one inequality in runs on IBM's publicly accessible quantum computers. The Clauser-Horne-Shimony-Holt (CHSH) inequality governs a linear combination S of expectation values of products of spin projections, taken pairwise. Finding S > 2 rules out local, hidden variable theories for entangled quantum systems. We obtained values of S greater than 2 in our runs prior to error mitigation. To reduce the quantitative errors, we used a modification of the error-mitigation procedure in the IBM documentation. We prepared a pair of qubits in the state |00〉, found the probabilities to observe the states |00〉, |01〉, |10〉, and |11〉 in multiple runs, and used that information to construct the first column of an error matrix M. We repeated this procedure for states prepared as |01〉, |10〉, and |11〉 to construct the full matrix M, whose inverse is the filtering matrix. After applying filtering matrices to our averaged outcomes, we have found good quantitative agreement between the quantum computer output and the quantum mechanical predictions for the extent of violation of both inequalities as functions of θ'.
Near-term quantum computers have been built as intermediate-scale quantum devices and are fragile against quantum noise effects, namely, NISQ devices. Traditional quantum-error-correcting codes are not implemented on such devices and to perform quantum computation in good accuracy with these machines we need to develop alternative approaches for mitigating quantum computational errors. In this work, we propose quantum error mitigation (QEM) scheme for quantum computational errors which occur due to couplings with environments during gate operations, i.e., decoherence. To establish our QEM scheme, first we estimate the quantum noise effects on single-qubit states and represent them as groups of quantum circuits, namely, quantum-noise-effect circuit groups. Then our QEM scheme is conducted by subtracting expectation values generated by the quantum-noise-effect circuit groups from those obtained by the quantum circuits for the quantum algorithms under consideration. As a result, the quantum noise effects are reduced, and we obtain approximately the ideal expectation values via the quantum-noise-effect circuit groups and the numbers of elementary quantum circuits composing them scale polynomial with respect to the products of the depths of quantum algorithms and the numbers of register bits. To numerically demonstrate the validity of our QEM scheme, we run noisy quantum simulations of qubits under amplitude damping effects for four types of quantum algorithms. Furthermore, we implement our QEM scheme on IBM Q Experience processors and examine its efficacy. Consequently, the validity of our scheme is verified via both the quantum simulations and the quantum computations on the real quantum devices. Our QEM scheme is solely composed of quantum-computational operations (quantum gates and measurements), and thus, it can be conducted by any type of quantum device. In addition, it can be applied to error mitigation for many other types of quantum noise effects as well as noisy quantum computing of long-depth quantum algorithms.
Suppressing noise in physical systems is of fundamental importance.As quantum computers mature, quantum error correcting codes (QECs) will be adopted in order to suppress errors to any desired level.However in the noisy, intermediate-scale quantum (NISQ) era, the complexity and scale required to adopt even the smallest QEC is prohibitive: a single logical qubit needs to be encoded into many thousands of physical qubits.Here we show that, for the crucial case of estimating expectation values of observables (key to almost all NISQ algorithms) one can indeed achieve an effective exponential suppression.We take n independently prepared circuit outputs to create a state whose symmetries prevent errors from contributing bias to the expected value.The approach is very well suited for current and near-term quantum devices as it is modular in the main computation and requires only a shallow circuit that bridges the n copies immediately prior to measurement.Using no more than four circuit copies, we confirm error suppression below 10 -6 for circuits consisting of several hundred noisy gates (2-qubit gate error 0.5%) in numerical simulations validating our approach.
Testing and verifying imperfect multi-qubit quantum devices are important as such noisy quantum devices are widely available today. Bell inequalities are known to be useful for testing and verifying the quality of the quantum devices from their nonlocal quantum states and local measurements. There have been many experiments demonstrating the violations of Bell inequalities, but they are limited in the number of qubits and the types of quantum states. We report violations of Bell inequalities on IBM Quantum devices based on the scalable and robust inequalities maximally violated by graph states as proposed by Baccari et al.. The violations are obtained from the quantum states of path graphs up to 57 and 21 qubits on a 65-qubit and two 27-qubit IBM Quantum devices, respectively, and from those of star graphs up to 11 qubits with quantum readout error mitigation (QREM). We are able to show violations of the inequalities on various graph states by constructing low-depth quantum circuits and by applying the QREM technique. We also point out that quantum circuits for star graph states of sizeNcan be realized with circuits of depthO(N)on subdivided honeycomb lattices which are the topology of the 65-qubit IBM Quantum device. Our experiments show encouraging results on the ability of existing quantum devices to prepare entangled quantum states and provide experimental evidence on the benefit of scalable Bell inequalities for testing them.