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arXiv:2608.14891

A gauge-invariant theory of small Markovian errors in quantum gate sets

Juan Gonzalez De Mendoza, Corey Ostrove, Timothy Proctor, Kevin Young, Erik Nielsen, Robin Blume-Kohout

quant-phSubmitted Aug 14, 2026• Announced Aug 18, 2026• 0 citations
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Abstract

Noisy logic operations on a quantum computational register -- e.g., one or more qubits -- can be described by transfer matrices (a.k.a. CPTP maps or superoperators) that act linearly on the density matrix representing the register's quantum state. Collectively, these operations form a gate set. Gate sets have a gauge freedom; many gate sets that appear different actually predict the same experimental outcomes. A property of a gate set can be observable (and thus physically relevant) only if it is gauge-invariant. Unfortunately, no good gauge-invariant parameterizations of gate sets are known. We introduce the next best thing, a perturbative gauge-invariant parameterization of small Markovian errors in gate sets. We construct vector spaces of properties that are first-order gauge-invariant (FOGI). We show how to construct and understand FOGI properties, how to use them as coordinates to parameterize gate sets without gauge freedom, and how to extract approximately gauge-invariant error metrics.

Comments
27 pages, 8 figures

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Noisy logic operations on a quantum computational register -- e.g., one or more qubits -- can be described by transfer matrices (a.k.a. CPTP maps or superoperators) that act linearly on the density matrix representing the register's quantum state. Collectively, these operations form a gate set. Gate sets have a gauge freedom; many gate sets that appear different actually predict the same experimental outcomes. A property of a gate set can be observable (and thus physically relevant) only if it is gauge-invariant. Unfortunately, no good gauge-invariant parameterizations of gate sets are known. We introduce the next best thing, a perturbative gauge-invariant parameterization of small Markovian errors in gate sets. We construct vector spaces of properties that are first-order gauge-invariant (FOGI). We show how to construct and understand FOGI properties, how to use them as coordinates to parameterize gate sets without gauge freedom, and how to extract approximately gauge-invariant error metrics.
Errors in quantum logic gates are usually modeled by quantum process matrices (CPTP maps).But process matrices can be opaque and unwieldy.We show how to transform the process matrix of a gate into an error generator that represents the same information more usefully.We construct a basis of simple and physically intuitive elementary error generators, classify them, and show how to represent the error generator of any gate as a mixture of elementary error generators with various rates.Finally, we show how to build a large variety of reduced models for gate errors by combining elementary error generators and/or entire subsectors of generator space.We conclude with a few examples of reduced models, including one with just 9N 2 parameters that describes almost all commonly predicted errors on an N -qubit processor.
Characterizing noise in quantum circuits is fundamentally limited by gauge degrees of freedom; certain parameters, such as the individual contributions of state preparation and measurement (SPAM) errors, are in principle unlearnable from any experiment within the gate set. Here, we show that the physical structure of realistic noise processes imposes approximate symmetry constraints on the Pauli fidelities of gate noise channels. These symmetries relate the fidelity of a Pauli PPP and its gate-conjugate UgPUg†U_g P U_g ^{\dagger}Ug​PUg†​, and can be used to fix the gauge using only knowledge of the error type and not its magnitude. Using Lindbladian perturbation theory, we analyze a broad class of Clifford gates, including ZZπ/2ZZ_{π/2}ZZπ/2​, CZ, CNOT, iSWAP, and SWAP, and demonstrate that coherent errors do not induce first-order asymmetry, while only a restricted set of predominantly off-diagonal dissipative errors can break the symmetry at first order, for which we derive simple selection rules. Notably, common single-qubit noise sources such as T1T_1T1​-relaxation and T2φT_{2φ}T2φ​-pure-dephasing can only cause asymmetry at second order. Leveraging these symmetries to fix the gauge enables systematic identification of SPAM errors, simplifying error characterization and mitigation. We validate our results numerically and experimentally on IBM Kingston.
We discuss the effects of a gauge freedom in representing quantum information processing devices, and its implications for characterizing these devices. We demonstrate with experimentally relevant examples that there exists equally valid descriptions of the same experiment which distribute errors differently among objects in a gate-set, leading to different error rates. Consequently, it can be misleading to attach a concrete operational meaning to figures of merit for individual gate-set elements. We propose an alternative operational figure of merit for a gate-set, the mean variation error, and a protocol for measuring this figure.
To successfully perform quantum computations, it is often necessary to first accurately characterize the noise in the underlying hardware. However, it is well known that fundamental limitations prevent the unique identification of the noise model. This raises the question of whether these limitations impact the ability to predict noisy dynamics and mitigate errors. Here, we show, both theoretically and experimentally, that when learnable parameters are self-consistently characterized, the (gauge) degrees of freedom do not impact predictions of noisy dynamics or error mitigation. We use the recently introduced framework of gate set Pauli noise learning to efficiently and self-consistently characterize and mitigate noise of a complete gate set, including state preparation, measurements, single-qubit gates and multi-qubit entangling Clifford gates. We validate our approach through experiments with up to 92 qubits and show that, while the gauge choice does not affect error-mitigated observables, optimizing it reduces sampling overhead.
Let H1{\mathcal H}_1H1​ be a finite dimensional complex Hilbert space. Let ψ↦Z(ψ)ψ\mapsto Z(ψ)ψ↦Z(ψ) be a canonical anti-commutation relations (CAR) field over H1{\mathcal H}_1H1​ acting irreducibly on a Hilbert space K{\mathord{\mathscr K}}K. The ∗*∗-algebra AH1{\mathscr A}_{{\mathcal H}_1}AH1​​ generated by the Z(ψ)Z(ψ)Z(ψ), ψ∈H1ψ\in {\mathcal H}_1ψ∈H1​, is simply all operators on K{\mathscr K}K. However, the CAR field endows AH1{\mathscr A}_{{\mathcal H}_1}AH1​​ with additional structure, and we are concerned with quantum operations acting in harmony with this structure. In particular, there is a "gauge" automorphism group generated by "second quantizing'' ψ↦eitψψ\mapsto e^{it}ψψ↦eitψ. The fixed point algebra of the gauge group, GH1{\mathscr G}_{{\mathcal H}_1}GH1​​, is a sub-algebra of AH1{\mathscr A}_{{\mathcal H}_1}AH1​​ studied by Araki and Wyss. It contains the density matrices of an important class of states, the {\em gauge invariant Gaussian states}, SGIG{\mathfrak S}_{GIG}SGIG​. Our focus is on semigroups {etL}t≥0\{e^{t{\mathscr L}}\}_{t\geq 0}{etL}t≥0​ of quantum operations on AH1{\mathscr A}_{{\mathcal H}_1}AH1​​ that map SGIG{\mathfrak S}_{GIG}SGIG​ into itself. Each etLe^{t{\mathscr L}}etL is one-to-one, and our first main result is a structure theorem for such quantum operations on GH1{\mathscr G}_{{\mathcal H}_1}GH1​​ that map SGIG{\mathfrak S}_{GIG}SGIG​ into itself. We apply this to study semigroups of quantum operations on GH1{\mathscr G}_{{\mathcal H}_1}GH1​​ that map SGIG{\mathfrak S}_{GIG}SGIG​ into itself. Our second main result is a structure theorem showing that they are parameterized by pairs (G,A)(G,A)(G,A) where GGG is a contraction semigroup generator on H1{\mathcal H}_1H1​, and 0≤A≤−G−G∗0 \leq A \leq -G -G^*0≤A≤−G−G∗. We then show that each of these semigroups has a natural extension to the full CAR algebra AH1{\mathscr A}_{{\mathcal H}_1}AH1​​. Further results are obtained under further assumptions on the pair (G,A)(G,A)(G,A).