One of the major challenges for erroneous quantum computers is undoubtedly the control over the effect of noise. Considering the rapid growth of available quantum resources that are not fully fault tolerant, it is crucial to develop practical hardware-friendly quantum error mitigation (QEM) techniques to suppress unwanted errors. Here, we propose a novel generalized quantum subspace expansion method which can handle stochastic, coherent, and algorithmic errors in quantum computers. By fully exploiting the substantially extended subspace, we can efficiently mitigate the noise present in the spectra of a given Hamiltonian, without relying on any information of noise. The performance of our method is discussed under two highly practical setups: the quantum subspaces are mainly spanned by powers of the noisy state ρ^{m} and a set of error-boosted states, respectively. We numerically demonstrate in both situations that we can suppress errors by orders of magnitude, and show that our protocol inherits the advantages of previous error-agnostic QEM techniques as well as overcoming their drawbacks.
One of the major challenges for erroneous quantum computers is undoubtedly the control over the effect of noise. Considering the rapid growth of available quantum resources that are not fully fault tolerant, it is crucial to develop practical hardware-friendly quantum error mitigation (QEM) techniques to suppress unwanted errors. Here, we propose a novel generalized quantum subspace expansion method which can handle stochastic, coherent, and algorithmic errors in quantum computers. By fully exploiting the substantially extended subspace, we can efficiently mitigate the noise present in the spectra of a given Hamiltonian, without relying on any information of noise. The performance of our method is discussed under two highly practical setups: the quantum subspaces are mainly spanned by powers of the noisy state ρ^{m} and a set of error-boosted states, respectively. We numerically demonstrate in both situations that we can suppress errors by orders of magnitude, and show that our protocol inherits the advantages of previous error-agnostic QEM techniques as well as overcoming their drawbacks.
In the era of quantum computing without full fault-tolerance, it is essential to suppress noise effects via the quantum error mitigation techniques to enhance the computational power of the quantum devices. One of the most effective noise-agnostic error mitigation schemes is the generalized quantum subspace expansion (GSE) method, which unifies various mitigation algorithms under the framework of the quantum subspace expansion. Specifically, the fault-subspace method, a subclass of GSE method, constructs an error-mitigated quantum state with copies of quantum states with different noise levels. However, from the experimental aspect, it is nontrivial to determine how to reliably amplify the noise so that the error in the simulation result is efficiently suppressed. In this work, we explore the potential of the fault-subspace method by leveraging the hardware-oriented noise: intentional amplification of the decoherence, noise boost by insertion of identity, making use of crosstalk, and probabilistic implementation of noise channel. We demonstrate the validity of our proposals via both numerical simulations with the noise parameters reflecting those in quantum devices available via IBM Quantum, and also experiments performed therein.
Realizing practical quantum computing requires overcoming a number of computation errors and the limitation of device size, which have intensively been tackled by quantum error mitigation. As a unified approach of noise-agnostic quantum error mitigation, generalized quantum subspace expansion (GSE) has lately been proposed to be remarkably robust regarding stochastic and coherent errors, integrating quantum subspace expansion and virtual state purification. However, the requirement in GSE to perform entangled measurements between copies of the quantum states remains a significant drawback under the current situation of quantum devices with a restricted number of qubits and their connectivity. In this work, we propose “Dual-GSE,” a resource-efficient implementation of GSE to circumvent this overhead by constructing an ansatz of error-mitigated quantum states via dual-state purification without state copies. Remarkably, the proposed method can further simulate larger quantum systems beyond the size of available quantum hardware, achieved by a suitable ansatz construction inspired by the divide-and-conquer strategy that classically reintroduces the effect of entanglement. While classically forging the entanglement comes with additional cost, the total sampling overhead can be notably reduced by reuse of the same Pauli expectation values among divided-and-conquered subsystems. We comprehensively analyze the advantages and overhead of Dual-GSE and perform numerical simulations of the eight-qubit transverse-field Ising model under various setups. Our results demonstrate that Dual-GSE estimates the ground state energy with high accuracy under gate noise with low mitigation overhead and practical sampling cost.
Quantum error mitigation (QEM) is typically viewed as a suite of practical techniques for today's noisy intermediate-scale quantum devices, with limited relevance once fault-tolerant quantum computers become available. In this work, we challenge this conventional wisdom by showing that QEM can continue to provide substantial benefits in the era of quantum error correction (QEC), and in an even more efficient manner than it does on current devices. We introduce a framework for logical-level QEM that leverages soft information naturally produced by QEC decoders, requiring no additional data, hardware modifications, or runtime overhead beyond what QEC protocols already provide. Within this framework, we develop and analyze three logical-level QEM techniques: post-selection and runtime abort policies, probabilistic error cancellation, and zero-noise extrapolation. Our techniques reduce logical error rates by more than 100x while discarding fewer than 0.1% of shots; they also provide in situ characterization of logical channels for QEM protocols. As a proof of principle, we benchmark our approach using a surface-code architecture and two state-of-the-art decoders based on tensor-network contraction and minimum-weight perfect matching. We evaluate logical-level QEM on random Clifford circuits and molecular simulation algorithms and find that, compared to previous approaches relying on QEC only or QEC combined with QEM, we can achieve up to 87.4% spacetime overhead savings. Our results demonstrate that logical-level QEM with QEC decoder soft information can reliably improve logical performance, underscoring the efficiency and usefulness of QEM techniques for fault-tolerant quantum computers.
Quantum error mitigation (QEM) is a crucial area of research for realizing fault-tolerant quantum computation. While various QEM techniques have been developed, many rely on classical post-processing of quantum measurements, which can introduce their own biases and limitations. This paper proposes a novel hardware error mitigation strategy leveraging the inherent properties of quantum entanglement and its susceptibility to environmental decoherence. The core idea is to actively suppress quantum decoherence, specifically targeting the entanglement that contributes significantly to error propagation in quantum computations. We formulate a control scheme that precisely modulates environmental parameters to minimize the detrimental effects of entanglement-induced decoherence. The effectiveness of this approach is demonstrated through a theoretical analysis, outlining the potential for significant error reduction without relying on complex post-processing algorithms. The key benefit lies in a proactive, hardware-level approach to mitigating errors, offering a potentially more robust and efficient solution compared to post-processing methods. This work establishes a foundational framework for future research in entanglement-aware QEM.
Quantum computers have the potential to solve several interesting problems in polynomial \ntime for which no polynomial time classical algorithms have been found. However, \none of the major challenges in building quantum devices is that quantum systems are very \nsensitive to noise arising from undesired interactions with the environment. Noise can lead \nto errors which can corrupt the results of the computation. Quantum error correction is \none way to mitigate the effects of noise arising in quantum devices. \nWith a plethora of quantum error correcting codes that can be used in various settings, \none of the main challenges of quantum error correction is understanding how well various \ncodes perform under more realistic noise models that can be observed in experiments. \nThis thesis proposes a new decoding algorithm which can optimize threshold values of \nerror correcting codes under different noise models. The algorithm can be applied to \nany Markovian noise model. Further, it is shown that for certain noise models, logical \nClifford corrections can further improve a code's threshold value if the code obeys certain \nsymmetries. \n \nSince gates and measurements cannot in general be performed with perfect precision, \nthe operations required to perform quantum error correction can introduce more errors \ninto the system thus negating the benefits of error correction. Fault-tolerant quantum \ncomputing is a way to perform quantum error correction with imperfect operations while \nretaining the ability to suppress errors as long as the noise is below a code's threshold. \nOne of the main challenges in performing fault-tolerant error correction is the high resource \nrequirements that are needed to obtain very low logical noise rates. With the use of \nflag qubits, this thesis develops new fault-tolerant error correction protocols that are applicable \nto arbitrary distance codes. Various code families are shown to satisfy the requirements \nof flag fault-tolerant error correction. We also provide circuits using a constant number of \nqubits for these codes. It is shown that the proposed flag fault-tolerant method uses fewer \nqubits than previous fault-tolerant error correction protocols. \n \nIt is often the case that the noise afflicting a quantum device cannot be fully characterized. \nFurther, even with some knowledge of the noise, it can be very challenging to use \nanalytic decoding methods to improve the performance of a fault-tolerant scheme. This \nthesis presents decoding schemes using several state of the art machine learning techniques \nwith a focus on fault-tolerant quantum error correction in regimes that are relevant to near \nterm experiments. It is shown that even in low noise rate regimes and with no knowledge \nof the noise, noise can be further suppressed for small distance codes. Limitations of machine \nlearning decoders as well as the classical resources required to perform active error \ncorrection are discussed. \n \nIn many cases, gate times can be much shorter than typical measurement times of \nquantum states. Further, classical decoding of the syndrome information used in quantum \nerror correction to compute recovery operators can also be much slower than gate times. \nFor these reasons, schemes where error correction can be implemented in a frame (known \nas the Pauli frame) have been developed to avoid active error correction. In this thesis, we \ngeneralize previous Pauli frame schemes and show how Clifford frame error correction can \nbe implemented with minimal overhead. Clifford frame error correction is necessary if the \nlogical component of recovery operators were chosen from the Clifford group, but could \nalso be used in randomized benchmarking schemes.
Recent experimental breakthroughs have signalled the imminent arrival of the early fault-tolerant era. However, for a considerable period in the foreseeable future, relying solely on quantum error correction for full error suppression will remain extremely challenging due to its substantial hardware overhead. Additional help from quantum error mitigation (QEM) is essential for bridging this gap towards achieving quantum advantage. The application of QEM has so far been restricted to expectation value estimation, leaving its extension to sampling-based algorithms -- which is expected to play a pivotal role in the early fault-tolerant era -- an unresolved challenge. In this work, we present a framework for applying any QEM techniques to obtain the error-mitigated output distribution, showing that this incurs no greater cost than estimating a single observable. We also devised a way to sample from this distribution and constructed an explicit scheme for applying any QEM methods to quantum phase estimation, which can be generalised to other sampling algorithms. Numerical experiments were conducted to validate the efficacy of these methods. We believe our methods significantly broaden the scope of QEM, extending its applicability to most algorithms of practical interest and forming a crucial step towards realising quantum advantage.