As quantum devices are progressively scaled and refined, quantum codes will become indispensable to guarantee reliable computation in the presence of noise. Due to the difficulties of characterizing physical noise, direct measures of logical performance will be of paramount use to tune quantum codes [18]. Logical Randomized Benchmarking in [5] aimed to characterize the logical operations directly by performing randomized benchmarking using logical operators and following each operation with perfect QEC. However, due to resource limitations, physical implementations such as [14] only measure the syndrome at the end of a computation. \n \nWe develop a generalized framework for procedures that measure the fidelity of logical operations directly, logical fidelity estimation (LFE). We identify several freedoms that arise when attempting to define a fidelity which characterizes quantum error correction, specifically, in how error detection events are processed and in how often error correction is performed. We explore these freedoms by conducting a survey to eliminate inviable procedures guided by the presence of upticks, a standard signature of non-Markovianity [33]. Our survey highlights procedures that are robust to gate-dependent noise and procedures which are implementable in the near-term. We recommend applying post-selection after each gate as a benchmark for quantum codes which is robust to gate-dependent noise. We manage to eliminate some naive near-term protocols, but guaranteeing the robustness when QEC is applied at a at fixed time or when post-selection is applied at the end, are open problems.
As quantum devices are progressively scaled and refined, quantum codes will become indispensable to guarantee reliable computation in the presence of noise. Due to the difficulties of characterizing physical noise, direct measures of logical performance will be of paramount use to tune quantum codes [18]. Logical Randomized Benchmarking in [5] aimed to characterize the logical operations directly by performing randomized benchmarking using logical operators and following each operation with perfect QEC. However, due to resource limitations, physical implementations such as [14] only measure the syndrome at the end of a computation. \n \nWe develop a generalized framework for procedures that measure the fidelity of logical operations directly, logical fidelity estimation (LFE). We identify several freedoms that arise when attempting to define a fidelity which characterizes quantum error correction, specifically, in how error detection events are processed and in how often error correction is performed. We explore these freedoms by conducting a survey to eliminate inviable procedures guided by the presence of upticks, a standard signature of non-Markovianity [33]. Our survey highlights procedures that are robust to gate-dependent noise and procedures which are implementable in the near-term. We recommend applying post-selection after each gate as a benchmark for quantum codes which is robust to gate-dependent noise. We manage to eliminate some naive near-term protocols, but guaranteeing the robustness when QEC is applied at a at fixed time or when post-selection is applied at the end, are open problems.
Logical qubits encoded in quantum error correcting codes can exhibit non-Markovian dynamical evolution, even when the underlying physical noise is Markovian. To understand this emergent non-Markovianity, we define a Markovianity condition appropriate to logical gate operations, and study it by relating logical operations to their physical implementation (operations on the data qubits into which the logical qubit is encoded). We apply our analysis to small quantum codes, and show that they exhibit non-Markovian dynamics even for very simple physical noise models. We show that non-Markovianity can emerge from Markovian physical operations if (and only if) the physical qubits are not necessarily returned to the code subspace after every round of QEC. In this situation, the syndrome qubits can act as a memory, mediating time correlations and enabling violation of the Markov condition. We quantify the emergent non-Markovianity in simple examples, and propose sufficient conditions for reliable use of gate-based characterization techniques like gate set tomography in early fault-tolerant quantum devices.
Extrapolating physical error rates to logical error rates requires many assumptions and thus can radically under- or overestimate the performance of an error correction implementation. We introduce logical randomized benchmarking, a characterization procedure that directly assesses the performance of a quantum error correction implementation at the logical level, and is motivated by a reduction to the well-studied case of physical randomized benchmarking. We show that our method reliably reports logical performance and can estimate the average probability of correctable and uncorrectable errors for a given code and physical channel.
Abstract A crucial task to obtain optimal and reliable quantum devices is to quantify their overall performance. The average fidelity of quantum gates is a particular figure of merit that can be estimated efficiently by randomized benchmarking (RB). However, the concept of gate-fidelity itself relies on the crucial assumption that noise behaves in a predictable, time-local, or so-called Markovian manner, whose breakdown can naturally become the leading source of errors as quantum devices scale in size and depth. We analytically show that error suppression techniques such as dynamical decoupling (DD) and Pauli-twirling can operationally Markovianize RB: (i) fast DD reduces non-Markovian RB to an exponential decay plus longer-time corrections, while on the other hand, (ii) Pauli-twirling generally does not affect the average, but (iii) it always suppresses the variance of such RB outputs. We demonstrate these effects numerically with a qubit noise model. Our results show that simple and efficient error suppression methods can simultaneously tame non-Markovian noise and allow for standard and reliable gate quality estimation, a fundamentally important task in the path toward fully functional quantum devices.
Randomized benchmarking (RB) protocols have become an essential tool for providing a meaningful partial characterization of experimental quantum operations. While the RB decay rate is known to enable estimates of the average fidelity of those operations under gate-independent Markovian noise, under gate-dependent noise this rate is more difficult to interpret rigorously. In this paper, we prove that single-qubit RB experiments provide direct estimates of the gateset circuit fidelity, a novel figure of merit which characterizes the expected average fidelity over arbitrary circuits of operations from the gateset. We also prove that, in the limit of high-fidelity single-qubit experiments, the difficulty introduced by gate-dependence reduces to a basis mismatch between the gates and the state-preparation and measurement procedures, that is, to a unitary degree of freedom in labeling the Pauli matrices. Based on numerical evidence and physically motivated arguments, we conjecture that these result hold for higher dimensions.
The rapid progress in the development of quantum devices is in large part due to the availability of a wide range of characterization techniques allowing to probe, test and adjust them. Nevertheless, these methods often make use of approximations that hold in rather simplistic circumstances. In particular, assuming that error mechanisms stay constant in time and have no dependence in the past, is something that will be impossible to do as quantum processors continue scaling up in depth and size. We establish a theoretical framework for the Randomized Benchmarking protocol encompassing temporally-correlated, so-called non-Markovian noise, at the gate level, for any gate set belonging to a wide class of finite groups. We obtain a general expression for the Average Sequence Fidelity (ASF) and propose a way to obtain average gate fidelities of full non-Markovian noise processes. Moreover, we obtain conditions that are fulfilled when an ASF displays authentic non-Markovian deviations. Finally, we show that even though gate-dependence does not translate into a perturbative term within the ASF, as in the Markovian case, the non-Markovian sequence fidelity nevertheless remains stable under small gate-dependent perturbations.
Quantum error correction (QEC) can strongly suppress noise, but predicting whether a computation succeeds requires understanding not only how much effective noise persists after QEC, but what form that noise takes. To thoroughly characterize this noise, we introduce logical gate set tomography (``logical GST''). Logical GST produces detailed representations of noisy logical operations that can be used to derive higher-level metrics, such as gate fidelity and diamond distance, and to test for non-Markovian and coherent logical errors. We use logical GST to obtain the first full, self-consistent characterization of a universal single-qubit logical gate set, implemented in the seven-qubit Steane code using Quantinuum System Model H1, a 20-qubit trapped-ion quantum processor. In the experimental data from H1, logical GST identified predominantly logical Pauli-stochastic errors, found no evidence of logical non-Markovianity, and detected weak potential signatures of coherent logical error. By contrast, higher-shot datasets generated with Quantinuum's detailed system emulator, identify mechanisms for weak but statistically significant logical non-Markovianity and strong evidence of coherent logical error. Finally, we use logical GST to perform error attribution with the system emulator, revealing how specific physical error sources shape logical error mechanisms.