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arXiv:2201.00752 · PRX Quantum

Quantum Error Mitigation via Matrix Product Operators

Yuchen Guo, Shuo Yang

Published Oct 31, 2022• 45 citations
arXivHTMLPDF

Abstract

In the era of noisy intermediate-scale quantum devices, the number of controllable hardware qubits is insufficient to implement quantum error correction.As an alternative, quantum error mitigation (QEM) can suppress errors in measurement results via repeated experiments and postprocessing of data.Typical techniques for error mitigation, e.g., the quasiprobability decomposition method, ignore correlated errors between different gates.Here, we introduce a QEM method based on the matrix product operator (MPO) representation of a quantum circuit that can characterize the noise channel with polynomial complexity.Our technique is demonstrated on a depth = 20 fully parallel quantum circuit of up to N q = 20 qubits undergoing local and global noise.The circuit error is reduced by a several-times factor with only a small bond dimension D = 1 for the noise channel.The MPO representation increases the accuracy of modeling noise without consuming more experimental resources, which improves the QEM performance and broadens its scope of application.Our method is hopeful of being applied to circuits in higher dimensions with more qubits and deeper depth.

DOI
10.1103/prxquantum.3.040313

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In the era of noisy intermediate-scale quantum devices, the number of controllable hardware qubits is insufficient to implement quantum error correction.As an alternative, quantum error mitigation (QEM) can suppress errors in measurement results via repeated experiments and postprocessing of data.Typical techniques for error mitigation, e.g., the quasiprobability decomposition method, ignore correlated errors between different gates.Here, we introduce a QEM method based on the matrix product operator (MPO) representation of a quantum circuit that can characterize the noise channel with polynomial complexity.Our technique is demonstrated on a depth = 20 fully parallel quantum circuit of up to N q = 20 qubits undergoing local and global noise.The circuit error is reduced by a several-times factor with only a small bond dimension D = 1 for the noise channel.The MPO representation increases the accuracy of modeling noise without consuming more experimental resources, which improves the QEM performance and broadens its scope of application.Our method is hopeful of being applied to circuits in higher dimensions with more qubits and deeper depth.
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.
Simulating quantum circuits with classical computers requires resources growing exponentially in terms of system size.Real quantum computer with noise, however, may be simulated polynomially with various methods considering different noise models.In this work, we simulate random quantum circuits in one dimension with matrix product density operators (MPDOs), for different noise models such as dephasing, depolarizing, and amplitude damping.We show that the method based on matrix product states (MPSs) fails to approximate the noisy output quantum states for any of the noise models considered, while the MPDO method approximates them well.Compared with the method of matrix product operators (MPOs), the MPDO method reflects a clear physical picture of noise (with inner indices taking care of the noise simulation) and quantum entanglement (with bond indices taking care of two-qubit gate simulation).Consequently, in case of weak system noise, the resource cost of the MPDO will be significantly less than that of the MPO due to a relatively small inner dimension needed for the simulation.In case of strong system noise, a relatively small bond dimension may be sufficient to simulate the noisy circuits, indicating a regime that the noise is large enough for an "easy" classical simulation, which is further supported by a comparison with the experimental results on an IBM cloud device.Moreover, we propose a more effective tensor updates scheme with optimal truncations for both the inner and the bond dimensions, performed after each layer of the circuit, which enjoys a canonical form of the MPDO for improving simulation accuracy.With truncated inner dimension to a maximum value κ and bond dimension to a maximum value χ , the cost of our simulation scales as ∼NDκ 3 χ 3 , for an N-qubit circuit with depth D.
Reducing measurement errors in multiqubit quantum devices is critical for performing any quantum algorithm. Here we show how to mitigate measurement errors by a classical postprocessing of the measured outcomes. Our techniques apply to any experiment where measurement outcomes are used for computing expected values of observables. Two error-mitigation schemes are presented based on tensor product and correlated Markovian noise models. Error rates parametrizing these noise models can be extracted from the measurement calibration data using a simple formula. Error mitigation is achieved by applying the inverse noise matrix to a probability vector that represents the outcomes of a noisy measurement. The error-mitigation overhead, including the number of measurements and the cost of the classical postprocessing, is exponential in $\ensuremath{\epsilon}n$, where $\ensuremath{\epsilon}$ is the maximum error rate and nnn is the number of qubits. We report experimental demonstration of our error-mitigation methods on IBM Quantum devices using stabilizer measurements for graph states with $n\ensuremath{\le}12$ qubits and entangled 20-qubit states generated by low-depth random Clifford circuits.
Implementing many important sub-circuits on near-term quantum devices remains a challenge due to the high levels of noise and the prohibitive depth on standard nearest-neighbour topologies. Overcoming these barriers will likely require quantum error mitigation (QEM) strategies. This work introduces the notion of efficient, high-fidelity verifier circuit architectures that we propose for use in such a QEM scheme. We provide a method for constructing verifier circuits for any quantum circuit that is accurately represented by a low-dimensional matrix product operator (MPO). We demonstrate our method by constructing explicit verifier circuits for multi-controlled single unitary gates as well as the quantum Fourier transform (QFT). By transpiling the circuits to a 2D array of qubits, we estimate the crossover point where the verifier circuit is shallower than the circuit itself, and hence useful for QEM. We propose a method of in situ QEM using the verifier circuit architecture. We conclude that our approach may be useful for calibrating quantum sub-circuits to counter coherent noise but cannot correct for the incoherent noise present in current devices.
We present a simple, malleable and low-overhead approach for improving generic biased quantum error mitigation (QEM) methods, achieving up to 15% fidelity improvements over standard QEM on 100-qubit circuits with up to 2000 entangling gates. We do so by constructing verifiable benchmark circuits which mirror the application circuit's native-gate structure and thus noise profile. These circuits can be used to benchmark and mitigate the bias of the underlying error mitigation method, requiring only the application circuit and hardware native gate set. We present two methods for generating benchmark circuits; one is agnostic to the target hardware at the expense of a small overhead of single-qubit gates, while the other is specific to the IBM superconducting hardware and has no gate overhead. As a corollary, we introduce benchmarked-noise zero-noise extrapolation (bnZNE) as a simple adaptation of zero-noise extrapolation (ZNE), one of the most popular error mitigation methods. We consider as an example the bias-mitigated ZNE and bnZNE of Trotterized Hamiltonian simulations, observing that our approaches outperform standard ZNE using both small-scale classical simulations and 100-qubit utility-scale experiments on the IBM superconducting hardware. We consider the measurement of both single-site observables as well as two-site correlations along a one-dimensional qubit chain. We also provide a software package for implementing the error mitigation techniques used in this research.
Quantum error mitigation (QEM) is vital for noisy intermediate-scale quantum (NISQ) devices. While most conventional QEM schemes assume discrete gate-based circuits with noise appearing either before or after each gate, the assumptions are inappropriate for describing realistic noise that may have strong gate dependence and complicated nonlocal effects, and general computing models such as analog quantum simulators. To address these challenges, we first extend the scenario, where each computation process, being either digital or analog, is described by a continuous time evolution. For noise from imperfections of the engineered Hamiltonian or additional noise operators, we show it can be effectively suppressed by a stochastic QEM method. Since our method assumes only accurate single qubit controls, it is applicable to all digital quantum computers and various analog simulators. Meanwhile, errors in the mitigation procedure can be suppressed by leveraging the Richardson extrapolation method. As we numerically test our method with various Hamiltonians under energy relaxation and dephasing noise and digital quantum circuits with additional two-qubit crosstalk, we show an improvement of simulation accuracy by 2 orders. We assess the resource cost of our scheme and conclude the feasibility of accurate quantum computing with NISQ devices.