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arXiv:2303.14103 · Physical Review Applied

Characterizing Crosstalk of Superconducting Transmon Processors

Andreas Ketterer, Thomas Wellens

Published Sep 27, 2023• 30 citations
arXivHTMLPDF

Abstract

Currently available quantum computing hardware based on superconducting transmon architectures realizes networks of hundreds of qubits with the possibility of controlled nearest-neighbor interactions. However, the inherent noise and decoherence effects of such quantum chips considerably alter basic gate operations and lead to imperfect outputs of the targeted quantum computations. In this work, we focus on the characterization of crosstalk effects, which manifest themselves in correlations between simultaneously executed quantum gates on neighboring qubits. After a short explanation of the physical origin of such correlations, we show how to efficiently and systematically characterize the magnitude of such crosstalk effects on an entire quantum chip using the randomized benchmarking protocol. We demonstrate the introduced protocol by running it on real quantum hardware provided by IBM and observe significant alterations in gate fidelities due to crosstalk. Lastly, based on the gained information, we propose more accurate means to simulate noisy quantum hardware by devising a crosstalk-aware noise model.

DOI
10.1103/physrevapplied.20.034065

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Currently available quantum computing hardware based on superconducting transmon architectures realizes networks of hundreds of qubits with the possibility of controlled nearest-neighbor interactions. However, the inherent noise and decoherence effects of such quantum chips considerably alter basic gate operations and lead to imperfect outputs of the targeted quantum computations. In this work, we focus on the characterization of crosstalk effects, which manifest themselves in correlations between simultaneously executed quantum gates on neighboring qubits. After a short explanation of the physical origin of such correlations, we show how to efficiently and systematically characterize the magnitude of such crosstalk effects on an entire quantum chip using the randomized benchmarking protocol. We demonstrate the introduced protocol by running it on real quantum hardware provided by IBM and observe significant alterations in gate fidelities due to crosstalk. Lastly, based on the gained information, we propose more accurate means to simulate noisy quantum hardware by devising a crosstalk-aware noise model.
Current advancements in technology have focused the attention of the quantum computing community toward exploring the potential of near-term devices whose computing power surpasses that of classical computers in practical applications. An unresolved central question revolves around whether the inherent noise in these devices can be overcome or whether any potential quantum advantage would be limited. There is no doubt that crosstalk is one of the main sources of noise in noisy intermediate-scale quantum (NISQ) systems, and it poses a fundamental challenge to hardware designs. Crosstalk between parallel instructions can corrupt quantum states and cause incorrect program execution. In this study, we present a necessary analysis of the crosstalk error effect on NISQ devices. Our approach is extremely straightforward and practical to estimate the crosstalk error of various multi-qubit devices. In particular, we combine the randomized benchmarking (RB) and simultaneous randomized benchmarking (SRB) protocol to estimate the crosstalk error from the correlation controlled-NOT (CNOT) gate. We demonstrate this protocol experimentally on 5-, 7-, \& 16-qubit devices. Our results demonstrate the crosstalk error model of three different IBM quantum devices over the experimental week and compare the error variation against the machine, number of qubits, quantum volume, processor, and topology. We then confirm the improvement in the circuit fidelity on different benchmarks by up to 3.06x via inserting an instruction barrier, as compared with an IBM quantum noisy device which offers near-optimal crosstalk mitigation in practice. Finally, we discuss the current system limitation, its tradeoff on fidelity and depth, noise beyond the NISQ system, and mitigation opportunities to ensure that the quantum operation can perform its quantum magic undisturbed.
Maintaining or even improving gate performance with growing numbers of parallel controlled qubits is a vital requirement for fault-tolerant quantum computing.For superconducting quantum processors, though isolated one-or two-qubit gates have been demonstrated with high fidelity, implementing these gates in parallel commonly shows worse performance.Generally, this degradation is attributed to various crosstalks between qubits, such as quantum crosstalk due to residual inter-qubit coupling.An understanding of the exact nature of these crosstalks is critical to figuring out respective mitigation schemes and improved qubit architecture designs with low crosstalk.Here we give a theoretical analysis of quantum crosstalk impact on simultaneous gate operations in a qubit architecture, where fixed-frequency transmon qubits are coupled via a tunable bus, and sub-100-ns controlled-Z (CZ) gates can be realized by applying a baseband flux pulse on the bus.Our analysis shows that for microwave-driven single-qubit gates, the dressing from the qubit-qubit coupling can cause non-negligible cross-driving errors when qubits operate near frequency collision regions.During CZ gate operations, although unwanted nearest-neighbor interactions are nominally turned off, sub-MHz parasitic next-nearest-neighbor interactions involving spectator qubits can still exist, causing considerable leakage or control error when one operates qubit systems around these parasitic resonance points.To ensure high-fidelity simultaneous operations, a request could be raised to figure out a better way to balance the gate error from target qubit systems themselves and the error from nonparticipating spectator qubits.Overall, our analysis suggests that towards useful quantum processors, the qubit architecture should be examined carefully in the context of high-fidelity simultaneous gate operations in a scalable qubit lattice.
We develop and apply an extension of the randomized compiling (RC) protocol that includes a special treatment of neighboring qubits and dramatically reduces crosstalk effects caused by the application of faulty gates on superconducting qubits in IBMQ quantum computers ( and ). Crosstalk errors, stemming from controlled- () two-qubit gates, are a crucial source of errors on numerous quantum computing platforms. For the IBMQ machines, their effect on the performance of a given quantum computation is often overlooked. Our RC protocol turns coherent noise due to crosstalk into a depolarizing noise channel that can then be treated using established error mitigation schemes, such as noise estimation circuits. We apply our approach to the quantum simulation of the nonequilibrium dynamics of the Bardeen-Cooper-Schrieffer (BCS) Hamiltonian for superconductivity, a particularly challenging model to simulate on quantum hardware because of the long-range interaction of Cooper pairs. With 135 gates, we work in a regime where crosstalk, as opposed to either Trotterization or qubit decoherence, dominates the error. Our twirling of neighboring qubits is shown to dramatically improve the noise estimation protocol without the need to add new qubits or circuits and allows for a quantitative simulation of the BCS model. Published by the American Physical Society 2024
One of the key challenges in current Noisy Intermediate-Scale Quantum (NISQ) computers is to control a quantum system with high-fidelity quantum gates. There are many reasons a quantum gate can go wrong - for superconducting transmon qubits in particular, one major source of gate error is the unwanted crosstalk between neighboring qubits due to a phenomenon called frequency crowding. We motivate a systematic approach for understanding and mitigating the crosstalk noise when executing near-term quantum programs on superconducting NISQ computers. We present a general software solution to alleviate frequency crowding by systematically tuning qubit frequencies according to input programs, trading parallelism for higher gate fidelity when necessary. The net result is that our work dramatically improves the crosstalk resilience of tunable-qubit, fixed-coupler hardware, matching or surpassing other more complex architectural designs such as tunable-coupler systems. On NISQ benchmarks, we improve worst-case program success rate by 13.3x on average, compared to existing traditional serialization strategies.
Crosstalk is a leading source of failure in multiqubit quantum information processors.It can arise from a wide range of disparate physical phenomena, and can introduce subtle correlations in the errors experienced by a device.Several hardware characterization protocols are able to detect the presence of crosstalk, but few provide sufficient information to distinguish various crosstalk errors from one another.In this article we describe how gate set tomography, a protocol for detailed characterization of quantum operations, can be used to identify and characterize crosstalk errors in quantum information processors.We demonstrate our methods on a two-qubit trapped-ion processor and a two-qubit subsystem of a superconducting transmon processor.
The control and handling of errors arising from cross talk and unwanted interactions in multiqubit systems is an important issue in quantum information processing architectures. We introduce a benchmarking protocol that provides information about the amount of addressability present in the system and implement it on coupled superconducting qubits. The protocol consists of randomized benchmarking experiments run both individually and simultaneously on pairs of qubits. A relevant figure of merit for the addressability is then related to the differences in the measured average gate fidelities in the two experiments. We present results from two similar samples with differing cross talk and unwanted qubit-qubit interactions. The results agree with predictions based on simple models of the classical cross talk and Stark shifts.