Flexible characterization techniques that provide a detailed picture of the experimental imperfections under realistic assumptions are crucial to gain actionable advice in the development of quantum computers.Gate set tomography self-consistently extracts a complete tomographic description of the implementation of an entire set of quantum gates, as well as the initial state and measurement, from experimental data.It has become a standard tool for this task but comes with high requirements on the number of sequences and their design, making it already experimentally challenging for only two qubits.In this work, we show that low-rank approximations of gate sets can be obtained from significantly fewer gate sequences and that it is sufficient to draw them at random.This coherent noise characterization however still contains the crucial information for improving the implementation.To this end, we formulate the data processing problem of gate set tomography as a rank-constrained tensor completion problem.We provide an algorithm to solve this problem while respecting the usual positivity and normalization constraints of quantum mechanics.For this purpose, we combine methods from Riemannian optimization and machine learning and develop a saddle-free second-order geometrical optimization method on the complex Stiefel manifold.Besides the reduction in sequences, we numerically demonstrate that the algorithm does not rely on structured gate sets or an elaborate circuit design to robustly perform gate set tomography.Therefore, it is more flexible than traditional approaches.We also demonstrate how coherent errors in shadow estimation protocols can be mitigated using estimates from gate set tomography.
Flexible characterization techniques that provide a detailed picture of the experimental imperfections under realistic assumptions are crucial to gain actionable advice in the development of quantum computers.Gate set tomography self-consistently extracts a complete tomographic description of the implementation of an entire set of quantum gates, as well as the initial state and measurement, from experimental data.It has become a standard tool for this task but comes with high requirements on the number of sequences and their design, making it already experimentally challenging for only two qubits.In this work, we show that low-rank approximations of gate sets can be obtained from significantly fewer gate sequences and that it is sufficient to draw them at random.This coherent noise characterization however still contains the crucial information for improving the implementation.To this end, we formulate the data processing problem of gate set tomography as a rank-constrained tensor completion problem.We provide an algorithm to solve this problem while respecting the usual positivity and normalization constraints of quantum mechanics.For this purpose, we combine methods from Riemannian optimization and machine learning and develop a saddle-free second-order geometrical optimization method on the complex Stiefel manifold.Besides the reduction in sequences, we numerically demonstrate that the algorithm does not rely on structured gate sets or an elaborate circuit design to robustly perform gate set tomography.Therefore, it is more flexible than traditional approaches.We also demonstrate how coherent errors in shadow estimation protocols can be mitigated using estimates from gate set tomography.
With quantum computing devices increasing in scale and complexity, there is a growing need for tools that obtain precise diagnostic information about quantum operations. However, current quantum devices are only capable of short unstructured gate sequences followed by native measurements. We accept this limitation and turn it into a new paradigm for characterizing quantum gate-sets. A single experiment—random sequence estimation—solves a wealth of estimation problems, with all complexity moved to classical post-processing. We derive robust channel variants of shadow estimation with close-to-optimal performance guarantees and use these as a primitive for partial, compressive and full process tomography as well as the learning of Pauli noise. We discuss applications to the quantum gate engineering cycle, and propose novel methods for the optimization of quantum gates and diagnosing cross-talk.
Quantum-system characterization techniques represent the front line in the identification and mitigation of noise in quantum computing but can be expensive in terms of quantum resources and time to repeatedly employ. Another challenging aspect is that the parameters governing the performance of various operations tend to drift over time and monitoring these is hence a difficult task. One of the most promising characterization techniques, gate-set tomography (GST), provides a self-consistent estimate of the completely positive trace-preserving (CPTP) maps for a complete set of gates, as well as preparation and measurement operators. We develop a method for performance optimization seeded by tomography (POST), which couples the power of GST with a classical optimization routine to achieve a consistent gate improvement in just a short number of steps within a given calibration cycle. By construction, the POST procedure finds the best available gate operation given the hardware and is therefore robust to the effects of drift. Further, in comparison to other quantum error-mitigation techniques, it builds upon a one-time application of GST. To demonstrate the performance of this method on a real quantum computer, we map out the operations of six qubit pairs on the superconducting ibmq_poughkeepsie quantum device. Under the restriction of logical-only control, we monitor the performance of the POST approach on a chosen controlled-not (cnot) gate over a period of six weeks. In this time, we achieve a consistent improvement in gate fidelity, averaging a fidelity increase of 21.1% as measured by randomized benchmarking. The POST approach should find wide applicability as it is hardware agnostic and can be applied at the upper logical level or at a deeper pulse-control level.
Abstract Engineering quantum devices requires reliable characterization of the quantum system, including qubits, quantum operations (also known as instruments) and the quantum noise. Recently, quantum gate set tomography (GST) has emerged as a powerful technique for self-consistently describing quantum states, gates, and measurements. However, non-Markovian correlations between the quantum system and environment impact the reliability of GST. To address this, we propose a self-consistent operational framework called instrument set tomography (IST) for non-Markovian GST. Based on the stochastic quantum process, the instrument set describes instruments and system-environment (SE) correlations. We introduce a linear inversion IST (LIST) to describe instruments and SE correlations without physical constraints. The disharmony of linear relationships between instruments is detected. Furthermore, we propose a physically constrained statistical method based on the maximum likelihood estimation for IST (MLE-IST) with adjustable dimensions. MLE-IST shows significant flexibility in adapting to different types of devices, such as noisy intermediate-scale quantum (NISQ) devices, by adjusting the model and constraints. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness and necessity of simultaneously describing instruments and SE correlations. Specifically, the LIST and MLE-IST obtains significant improvement on average square error reduction in the imperfect implemented simulations by orders of −23.77 and −6.21, respectively, compared to their comparative methods. Remarkably, real-chip experiments indicate that a polynomial number of parameters with respect to the Markovian order are sufficient to characterize non-Markovian quantum noise in current NISQ devices. Consequently, IST provides an essential and self-consistent framework for characterizing, benchmarking, and developing quantum devices in terms of the instrument set.
Characterizing errors on many-qubit quantum computers remains a key challenge to understanding and improving the performance of these devices. Current characterization methods either don't scale beyond a few qubits, or make simplifying assumptions (such as assuming stochastic Pauli error) that obscure the underlying physical error mechanisms. In this work, we present a scalable extension to gate set tomography-linearized gate set tomography-that enables characterization of many-qubit systems. Linearized gate set tomography relies on sparse error models, a linear approximation to enable efficient data fitting, and data from shallow circuits-so that the systematic error in the linear approximation is small. We demonstrate the accuracy of our technique using simulations of a ten-qubit system with coherent and stochastic errors, including coherent crosstalk, and we demonstrate that it is robust in presence of additional errors that are not included within the sparse error model ansatz.
With quantum computing devices increasing in scale and complexity, there is a growing need for tools that obtain precise diagnostic information about quantum operations. However, current quantum devices are only capable of short unstructured gate sequences followed by native measurements. We accept this limitation and turn it into a new paradigm for characterizing quantum gate-sets. A single experiment-random sequence estimation-solves a wealth of estimation problems, with all complexity moved to classical post-processing. We derive robust channel variants of shadow estimation with close-to-optimal performance guarantees and use these as a primitive for partial, compressive and full process tomography as well as the learning of Pauli noise. We discuss applications to the quantum gate engineering cycle, and propose novel methods for the optimization of quantum gates and diagnosing cross-talk.
High-dimensional optical modes usually require a large number of measurements to be characterized— typically of the order O ( d 2 ) where d is the dimension of the underlying Hilbert space. Recently developed compressive tomography techniques can reconstruct low-rank signals with minimum measurements and no a priori assumptions [1] , [2] , [3] , [4] . We discuss results of randomized compressive tomography (RCT) implemented with a quantum pulse gate (QPG), a device that performs flexible optical measurements in the time-frequency domain [5] , [6] . In our experiments, we perform different random von Neumann basis measurements with a QPG that exploits dispersion-engineered sum-frequency generation in lithium niobate waveguides to implement projections onto arbitrary user-specified temporal mode superpositions. Based solely on the measurement data and nothing else, one can deterministically compute a positive number s cvx that monotonically estimates the size of the convex set of signal states consistent with the measurement data. For a sufficient number of informationally complete (IC) QPG projections, the convex set converges to a single point ( s cvx = 0), where the signal is uniquely reconstructed.