Preparation and verification of specific quantum states is an important capability for quantum devices to realise advantages over classical computations and algorithms. In this work, we have demonstrated an end-to-end framework that combines resource-efficient quantum state preparation with rapid, robust fidelity verification on near-term quantum hardware. By experimentally preparing and validating a structured complex quantum state encoding a digitized acoustic signal on the Quantinuum H2-1 trapped-ion platform, we achieved a high hardware fidelity of $F_{\mathrm{hw}} = 0.929$. Crucially, this milestone was realized without relying on idealized assumptions or deep fault-tolerant overhead, but rather through resource-minimal circuits optimized for NISQ-era and early fault-tolerant devices.
Furthermore, we addressed a key limitation in current quantum state certification. While validation methods like shadow overlap work well for random states, their sample complexity can become prohibitively high for the structured states used in practical algorithms. We mitigate this by introducing a pre-measurement basis-change technique that reduces the verification parameter, $τ$, by over 10 orders of magnitude for structured targets. This approach tightens the theoretical certification guarantees of the shadow overlap method and integrates tensor-network preparation and shadow validation into a unified workflow. These results shift the paradigm of how structured classical data can be mapped to and verified on quantum hardware under realistic noise and measurement budgets. By compressing a robust verification procedure to just 1,000 measurement shots, this framework offers an immediate, scalable benchmarking standard.
Preparation and verification of specific quantum states is an important capability for quantum devices to realise advantages over classical computations and algorithms. In this work, we have demonstrated an end-to-end framework that combines resource-efficient quantum state preparation with rapid, robust fidelity verification on near-term quantum hardware. By experimentally preparing and validating a structured complex quantum state encoding a digitized acoustic signal on the Quantinuum H2-1 trapped-ion platform, we achieved a high hardware fidelity of Fhw=0.929. Crucially, this milestone was realized without relying on idealized assumptions or deep fault-tolerant overhead, but rather through resource-minimal circuits optimized for NISQ-era and early fault-tolerant devices.
Furthermore, we addressed a key limitation in current quantum state certification. While validation methods like shadow overlap work well for random states, their sample complexity can become prohibitively high for the structured states used in practical algorithms. We mitigate this by introducing a pre-measurement basis-change technique that reduces the verification parameter, τ, by over 10 orders of magnitude for structured targets. This approach tightens the theoretical certification guarantees of the shadow overlap method and integrates tensor-network preparation and shadow validation into a unified workflow. These results shift the paradigm of how structured classical data can be mapped to and verified on quantum hardware under realistic noise and measurement budgets. By compressing a robust verification procedure to just 1,000 measurement shots, this framework offers an immediate, scalable benchmarking standard.
Quantum processing of classical data fundamentally relies on efficiently mapping classical datasets onto the amplitudes of quantum states. Preparing large amplitude-encoded states, however, remains a major bottleneck in quantum computing. In this paper, we introduce a novel state-preparation framework we call Q-MERGE, that addresses this bottleneck by partitioning a large target state into Mn-qubit segments, preparing these segments independently and in parallel, and then coherently combining them into a single amplitude-encoded state using SELECT-SWAP operations and measurement. Q-MERGE is agnostic to the segment-level preparation method, allowing existing techniques to be applied to smaller subproblems while providing a tunable trade-off between circuit depth and qubit count. With mid-circuit measurement and preparation-register reuse, the required ancilla qubits can be reduced from O(Mn) to O(n). Applied to a real-world 32x1024 ultrasound dataset, Q-MERGE achieves an infidelity of 3.5x10−9, compared with 6.2x10−3 for direct preparation using the same underlying method, a more than six orders of magnitude improvement at equal CNOT circuit depth. We demonstrate its feasibility experimentally with a 53 qubit circuit comprised of 954 1-qubit gates and 478 2-qubit gates, on the Quantinuum System Model H2 trapped-ion quantum computer. The prepared state is validated using shadow-overlap tomography. Numerical analysis of Haar-random states indicates consistent success probability for up to M=107 segments, supporting the scalability of Q-MERGE for encoding massive classical datasets.
Sampling-based proposals are prominent candidates for demonstrating quantum computations beyond the reach of classical supercomputers. However, it has been difficult to combine their complexity-theoretic hardness with two capabilities needed for scalable quantum computing more generally: suppressing hardware errors, and verifying the quantum computation itself. Here we address both issues by introducing structured circuits, which, in addition to provable hardness guarantees, admit an encoding in a quantum code. This allows us to simultaneously reach high fidelities at high circuit depths, and to certify an experimental fidelity via the circuit structure and measurement of code syndromes. The resulting certificate is device dependent, but requires substantially weaker noise assumptions than existing fidelity proxy benchmarks. We demonstrate our proposal with a 64-qubit, depth-73 Clifford circuit, doped with 314T gates. We use a total of 76 physical qubits to encode this computation in spacetime codes, effectively suppressing gate error rates by 10× after syndrome post-selection, and yielding a state with a fidelity lower bound of 0.349 with 95% confidence. Our construction is a systematic method for promoting a stabilizer state to a magic state while keeping an error-detected fidelity certificate.
Abstract The arrival of noisy intermediate-scale quantum (NISQ) devices defines an era in which quantum utility is fundamentally constrained by finite coherence times, limited qubit counts, gate infidelities, restricted connectivity, and measurement noise. Within this regime, hybrid quantum-classical frameworks have emerged as the dominant operational paradigm, particularly for quantum machine learning (QML). This review identifies a fundamental trade-off between expressivity, trainability, and noise resilience that governs the performance and scalability of NISQ-era QML systems. To contextualize these challenges, we introduce the resource-constrained iterative routing framework, a hardware-aware conceptual architecture that integrates topology-aware classical compression and distributed quantum orchestration to maintain circuit depths within device-dependent limits while routing representations toward symmetry-constrained Hilbert subspaces to mitigate noise-induced barren plateaus. Furthermore, we shift the discussion of quantum advantage away from asymptotic fault-tolerant complexity toward the notion of operational NISQ advantage based on finite-resource scaling, trainability preservation, and sampling complexity. We evaluate the practical resource efficiency of variational quantum algorithms, quantum kernel methods, and quantum neural networks across superconducting, trapped-ion, neutral-atom, and photonic platforms. The review also examines reproducibility challenges, emphasizing benchmarking against optimized classical baselines, and discusses strategies for managing the sampling overhead of error mitigation alongside distributed execution and quantum circuit compilation. Ultimately, NISQ in Practice positions hybrid QML as a physically constrained computational paradigm while outlining a pathway from contemporary noisy workflows toward early fault-tolerant quantum architectures.
Characterizing quantum processes is essential for hardware benchmarking, error diagnosis, and algorithm verification. While recent work [PRX QUANTUM \textbf{4}, 040337 (2023)] extended classical shadows from quantum state to quantum process, enabling efficient single-channel E property prediction, its applicability to composite processes f(E1,E2,⋯,Ek) remains unexplored. We introduce shadow engineering, a framework encoding the classical shadows of processes into sparse transfer matrices to predict f(E1,E2,⋯,Ek) properties with proven polynomial sample complexity, matching single-channel efficiency while exponentially lower than quantum process tomography. Crucially, this approach repurposes existing Em-shadow data without physical execution of f(E1,E2,⋯,Ek), enabling flexible quantum process characterization with minimal hardware overhead. We demonstrate the framework's effectiveness and practicality on a superconducting quantum processor for typical applications such as error mitigation and Hamiltonian dynamical simulation. This framework unlocks new capabilities for predicting complex quantum behaviors without physical re-execution, with immediate applications in near-term device calibration and quantum simulation.
Measurement overhead and hardware noise present fundamental obstacles to the practical realization of quantum algorithms on near-term quantum devices. In many quantum applications, the dominant computational cost arises from repeated measurements needed to extract accurate information and from handling noise effects. This dissertation develops a unified framework for efficient measurement and error mitigation in quantum algorithms.In this work, measurement is treated as a controllable and designable component across hardware, algorithmic, and statistical levels, rather than as a fixed final step. By tailoring measurement schemes and estimators, we show that substantial reductions in measurement cost can be achieved without sacrificing accuracy. This approach is developed and validated across multiple settings, from hardware-level randomized measurement implementations to algorithm-level molecular energy estimation.At the hardware level, we investigate randomized measurement schemes based on photonic metasurfaces. We find that the device itself naturally realizes the required family of measurement bases without repeated active optical reconfiguration, providing an efficient platform for randomized measurements. We analyze the effect of realistic measurement noise and develop calibration-based error mitigation techniques that suppress noise-induced bias. Numerical studies show that this approach enables accurate estimation of state properties under realistic measurement noise.At the algorithmic level, we investigate measurement-efficient quantum eigen solvers through the Non-Orthogonal Quantum Eigensolver (NOQE). We develop a detailed implementation framework for NOQE, including circuit construction and simplification, analysis of measurement complexity, and resource estimation. Building on this understanding, we incorporate randomized measurements as an alternative to standard Hadamard-test-based schemes and develop shadow-tomography-enhanced variants of NOQE that significantly reduce circuit complexity and qubit requirements while maintaining favorable sample complexity. Shadow-based error mitigation methods, including shadow distillation, further improve robustness against noise.Finally, we investigate a more fundamental redesign of the NOQE measurement task by reformulating matrix-element estimation as a quantum amplitude estimation problem. By integrating iterative quantum amplitude estimation into the NOQE framework, we replace the original incoherent sampling-based estimation with coherent information accumulation through amplitude amplification and achieve near-Heisenberg scaling in measurement complexity, improving on the standard sampling-based methods. Numerical results for molecular energy estimation demonstrate that this approach reaches chemical accuracy with fewer queries than the original NOQE.Overall, this dissertation shows that measurement overhead is not a fixed limitation, but a resource bottleneck that can be identified and reduced at multiple levels in quantum applications. Across the settings studied here, improvements are achieved at different layers, including hardware-aware randomized measurements, algorithm-level redesign of measurement protocols, estimator-level error mitigation, and statistical improvements based on coherent information accumulation. Taken together, these results provide a unified framework for understanding and reducing measurement cost under realistic noise, and offer practical guidance for the design of quantum algorithms on near-term quantum devices.
Verification protocols provide cryptographic guarantees that the outcome of a delegated quantum computation is correct, a key requirement for scalable and trustworthy quantum computing. A central assumption underlying these protocols is secret independence: the noise affecting state preparation must not depend on the classical secrets that specify the prepared states. In earlier protocols this assumption was enforced by the physical separation of client and server; in the recent on-chip setting it becomes a property of the hardware itself, and one that high-fidelity devices do not automatically satisfy. We first make the requirement quantitative, deriving a bound that shows how residual secret dependence limits the size of any verifiable computation within this framework. Motivated by this, we introduce a calibration framework that enforces secret independence through pulse-level quantum control, producing state preparations that are simultaneously high-fidelity and secret-independent. We assess its performance on a nitrogen-vacancy centre system via emulation, showing that it reduces the secret dependence of the preparations by more than an order of magnitude compared to standard optimal control, and that it is robust against detuning and drive-amplitude errors commonly encountered in experiment. The framework operates entirely at the calibration stage and is platform-agnostic, offering a practical pathway towards verifiable quantum computing at scale.