A quantum Pauli noise is a nonunitary process that alters the state of a qubit by random application of the four Pauli operators. We investigate a four-qubit quantum circuit, consisting of a pipeline of three independently controlled Pauli gates, for simulating the general class of qubit Pauli noises. The circuit with a fixed architecture is controllable by three separable quantum states from three auxiliary qubits in order to adjust the parameters of the targeted Pauli noise on the principal qubit. Important Pauli noises such as bit flip, phase flip, bit phase flip, and depolarizing noise are readily simulated, along with an infinite subset of other Pauli noises. However, the quantum circuit with its simple and fixed architecture cannot simulate all conceivable Pauli noises, and a characterization is proposed, in the parameter space of the Pauli noises, denoting those that are simulable by the circuit and those that are not. The circuit is a useful tool to contribute to controlled simulation, on current or future quantum processors, of nonunitary processes of noise and decoherence.
A quantum Pauli noise is a nonunitary process that alters the state of a qubit by random application of the four Pauli operators. We investigate a four-qubit quantum circuit, consisting of a pipeline of three independently controlled Pauli gates, for simulating the general class of qubit Pauli noises. The circuit with a fixed architecture is controllable by three separable quantum states from three auxiliary qubits in order to adjust the parameters of the targeted Pauli noise on the principal qubit. Important Pauli noises such as bit flip, phase flip, bit phase flip, and depolarizing noise are readily simulated, along with an infinite subset of other Pauli noises. However, the quantum circuit with its simple and fixed architecture cannot simulate all conceivable Pauli noises, and a characterization is proposed, in the parameter space of the Pauli noises, denoting those that are simulable by the circuit and those that are not. The circuit is a useful tool to contribute to controlled simulation, on current or future quantum processors, of nonunitary processes of noise and decoherence.
Quantum noise or decoherence is a major factor impacting the performance of quantum technologies. On the qubit, an important quantum noise, often relevant in practice, is the thermal noise or generalized amplitude damping noise, describing the interaction with a thermal bath at an arbitrary temperature. A qubit thermal noise however cannot be modeled nor directly simulated with a few elementary Pauli operators, but instead requires specific operators. Our main goal here is to construct a circuit model for simulating the thermal noise from standard elementary qubit operators. Starting from a common quantum-operation model based on Kraus operators and an associated qubit-environment model, we derive a proper Stinespring dilated representation for the thermal noise. This dilated unitary model is then decomposed in terms of simple elementary qubit operators, and converted into a circuit based on elementary quantum gates. We arrive at our targeted simulator circuit for the thermal noise, coming with built-in easy control on the noise parameters. The noise simulator is then physically implemented and tested on an IBM-Q quantum processor. The simulator represents a useful addition to existing libraries of quantum circuits for quantum processors, and it offers a new tool for investigating quantum signal and information processing having to cope with thermal noise.
For random quantum circuits on n qubits of depth Θ ( log n ) with depolarizing noise, the task of sampling from the output state can be efficiently performed classically using a Pauli path method \cite{Aharonov2023_paulipaths} . This paper aims to study the performance of this method beyond random circuits. We first consider the classical simulation of local observables in circuits composed of Clifford and T gates – going beyond the average case analysis, we derive sufficient conditions for simulatability in terms of the noise rate and the fraction of gates that are T gates, and show that if noise is introduced at a faster rate than T gates, the simulation becomes classically easy. As an application of this result, we study 2D QAOA circuits that attempt to find low-energy states of classical Ising models on general graphs. There, our results shows that for hard instances of the problem, which correspond to Ising model's graph being geometrically non-local, a QAOA algorithm mapped to a geometrically local circuit architecture using SWAP gates does not have any asymptotic advantage over classical algorithms if depolarized at a constant rate. Finally, we illustrate instances where the Pauli path method fails to give the correct result, and also initiate a study of the trade-off between fragility to noise and classical complexity of simulating a given quantum circuit.
Quantum counters are very crucial elements in the design of quantum sequential circuits and quantum control systems. This article details the design, implementation, and noise-aware benchmarking of large-scale quantum counter designs based on the Qiskit framework and IBM Quantum computing platforms. The quantum counter architectures introduced are 2-bit, 3-bit, 4-bit, and 5-bit quantum counters which are developed using reversible quantum gates like Pauli-X, Controlled-NOT (CNOT), Toffoli, and Multi-Controlled X (MCX) gates. Firstly, all the counter architectures were confirmed to be working well in the ideal simulation scenario using the Qiskit Aer simulator where they achieved perfect computational fidelity and produced correct counting sequences. For the assessment of practical performance in the Noisy Intermediate-Scale Quantum (NISQ) environment, several quantum noise models, including bit-flip noise, depolarizing noise, amplitude damping noise, and phase damping noise, were introduced within the experimental framework. The experimental findings indicate that as circuits become more complex, the precision of computations decreases in the presence of real-world noise conditions. Under bit-flip noise, the correct counts noted changed from 846 for the 2-bit counter to 620 for the 5-bit counter. Likewise, depolarizing noise led to a slight decline, whereas amplitude damping noise resulted in the most drastic decrease in performance, dropping the correct counts from 253 in the 2-bit design to merely 33 in the 5-bit design. On the contrary, a phase damping noise showed almost no impact and retained 1024 correct counts across all architectures. The scalability analysis demonstrates that quantum counter architectures based on reversible gates can proficiently work over quite extensive qubit configurations while maintaining functional correctness. Nevertheless, the increase in circuit depth and gate complexity mainly results in susceptibility to decoherence and noise accumulation. This work offers a unified framework for the development and evaluation of large-scale quantum sequential circuits and sheds light on building quantum systems that can be used fault-tolerantly in future quantum computing implementations.
Abstract In this work, we consider biased-noise qubits affected only by bit-flip errors, which is motivated by existing systems of stabilized cat qubits. This property allows us to design a class of noisy Hadamard tests involving entangling and certain non-Clifford gates, which can be conducted reliably with only a polynomial overhead in algorithm repetitions. On the flip side, we also found classical algorithms able to efficiently simulate both the noisy and noiseless versions of our specific variants of the Hadamard test. We propose to use these algorithms as a benchmark of the biasness of the noise at the scale of large circuits. The bias being checked on a full computational task makes our benchmark sensitive to crosstalk or time-correlated errors, which are usually invisible from individual gate tomography. For realistic noise models, phase-flip will not be negligible, but in the Pauli-Twirling approximation, we show that our benchmark could check the correctness of circuits containing up to 106 gates, several orders of magnitude larger than circuits not exploiting a noise-bias. Our benchmark is applicable for an arbitrary noise-bias, beyond Pauli models.
Quantum noise is a central challenge in quantum computing across many applications. Extensive work has examined how qubits couple to their environment, leading to decoherence and irreversible relaxation. This work studies a continuous coherent noise model for quantum circuits and compares it with a discrete Pauli model. The focus is on small, coherent gate errors that accumulate across circuit depth. These errors are modeled as random rotations on the Bloch sphere using a von Mises-Fisher distribution. In the small-angle limit, the model reduces to an isotropic Gaussian distribution. We test the model on quantum error-correction circuits based on the [[5,1,3]] and [[7,1,3]] codes. A variant of Grover's search circuit with different qubit counts is also examined. To enable fair comparison, we introduce a model-independent matching scheme. Pauli and continuous noise channels are aligned using the binary entropy at readout. This isolates the effect of noise structure at fixed uncertainty. An approximate analytical method for the propagation of coherent errors is also developed. The method tracks error distributions both on Clifford and non-Clifford circuits without full Monte Carlo sampling. It reduces simulation cost while preserving accuracy for circuit-level error estimates. The approximation is validated against brute-force simulations, identifying its regime of validity with Clifford and non-Clifford circuits under error correction. Our results show that continuous coherent noise and Pauli noise lead to comparable logical-error trends in the stabilizer-code circuits studied here. This behavior is consistent with syndrome extraction projecting a general single-qubit error onto Pauli-error subspaces before recovery. They also show where simplified propagation models work well and where their accuracy is reduced.
Quantum devices in the noisy intermediate-scale quantum (NISQ) era are highly susceptible to different types of quantum noise, which directly impact the reliability of experimental results. This work provides a characterization of error behavior arising from quantum noises on IBM's superconducting quantum processor, offering practical insights for algorithm design, benchmarking, and error-mitigation strategies on a real superconducting quantum processor in the NISQ era. The study begins with the measurement of the basis state, without applying any gate, to quantify state-preparation and measurement (SPAM) errors. Additionally, the errors are further quantified due to the application of single-qubit Pauli-X, two-qubit CNOT gate and other multi-qubit Controlled-X gates. Each circuit was executed with 1024 shots, and the percentage error between the expected and observed outputs was computed. The results show that the single-qubit Pauli-X gate exhibits relatively low errors in comparison with the two-qubit CNOT gate, whereas other multi-qubit Controlled-X gates lead to significantly higher deviations. This work also analyzes the noise effect of a fourqubit Controlled-X gate being implemented using a three-qubit Controlled-X gate with an extra auxiliary qubit, and the result shows a significant reduction in the error rate.