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The Decoherence of Schrödinger’s State: A Quantitative Analysis of Fidelity in Noisy Quantum Simulations

William Wallace Teodoro Rodrigues, Jo�ão Fabrício Filho

Published Nov 5, 2025• 0 citations
Publisher

Abstract

The viability of algorithms on Noisy Intermediate-Scale Quantum (NISQ) computers is limited by operational errors and decoherence. To optimize execution, it is crucial to understand how circuit complexity (depth and number of gates), statistical sampling (shots), and result fidelity interact. This work investigates that relationship through large-scale simulations of 100,000 random circuits under a physically motivated noise model with temporal decoherence (T1/T2) and gate errors. The analysis shows a strong negative correlation between circuit complexity and Hellinger fidelity, revealing a “fidelity ceiling” where increasing shots reduces statistical error but cannot overcome noise. For complex circuits, the number of gates is identified as a stronger predictor of error than circuit depth.

DOI
10.5753/eradse.2025.16905

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The viability of algorithms on Noisy Intermediate-Scale Quantum (NISQ) computers is limited by operational errors and decoherence. To optimize execution, it is crucial to understand how circuit complexity (depth and number of gates), statistical sampling (shots), and result fidelity interact. This work investigates that relationship through large-scale simulations of 100,000 random circuits under a physically motivated noise model with temporal decoherence (T1/T2) and gate errors. The analysis shows a strong negative correlation between circuit complexity and Hellinger fidelity, revealing a “fidelity ceiling” where increasing shots reduces statistical error but cannot overcome noise. For complex circuits, the number of gates is identified as a stronger predictor of error than circuit depth.
Considerable effort in experimental quantum computing is devoted to noisy intermediate scale quantum computers (NISQ computers). Understanding the effect of noise is important for various aspects of this endeavor including notable claims for achieving quantum supremacy and attempts to demonstrate quantum error correcting codes. In this paper we use Fourier methods combined with statistical analysis to study the effect of noise. In particular, we use Fourier analysis to refine the linear cross-entropy fidelity estimator. We use both analytical methods and simulations to study the effect of readout and gate errors, and we use our analysis to study the samples of Google's 2019 quantum supremacy experiment.
Quantum computing in the Noisy Intermediate-Scale Quantum (NISQ) era faces significant challenges due to the limitations in quantum gate fidelity and elevated error rates, which impede the successful execution of large-scale quantum circuits. One major source of errors in quantum computing is ’coherence errors’, which arise from the idle time during circuit execution. Specifically, factors such as uneven gate operations, hardware limitations, and qubit connectivity constraints collectively contribute to the formation of ’holes’ in quantum circuits, leading to ’idle qubits’. These idle periods, in turn, increase noise and error rates, thus negatively impacting the overall reliability of quantum circuits’ outputs.
Abstract Noisy intermediate-scale quantum (NISQ) computers have gate errors and decoherence, limiting the depth of circuits that can be implemented on them. A strategy for NISQ algorithms is to reduce the circuit depth at the expense of increasing the qubit count. Here, we exploit this trade-off for an application called entanglement spectroscopy, where one computes the entanglement of a state on systems by evaluating the Rényi entropy of the reduced state . For a -qubit state , the Rényi entropy of order is computed via , with the complexity growing exponentially in for classical computers. Johri et al (2017 Phys. Rev . B 96 195136) introduced a quantum algorithm that requires copies of and whose depth scales linearly in . Here, we present a quantum algorithm requiring twice the qubit resources ( copies of ) but with a depth that is independent of both and . Surprisingly this depth is only two gates. Our numerical simulations show that this short depth leads to an increased robustness to noise.
The advent of noisy intermediate-scale quantum (NISQ) devices has not only opened up new possibilities to studying quantum computational benefits, but it has also presented new challenges associated with noise and short coherence times. Entanglement is one of the inherent resources that can be used to perform quantum computation and implement the performance and reliability of quantum algorithms. This paper looks at entanglement dynamics in NISQ machines subjected to natural noises. The study focuses on the problem of examining the role of various noise channels in the creation, dynamics, and decay of the entanglement during quantum operations, such as depolarizing, amplitude damping, and phase damping. The study is based on theoretical modeling and numerical simulations of multi-qubit quantum circuits to determine the stability of entangled states with respect to circuit depth and intensity of noise. Concurrence and von Neumann entropy are examples of entanglement measures that are used to characterize correlations between qubits as well as to trace the dynamics of these correlations across computational interactions. The results show that noise has major impacts on entanglement distribution, which tends to cause rapid decays in highly entangled states with increase in circuit complexity. The findings, however, also show that there are some circuit architectures and error-mitigation schemes that can somewhat sustain entanglement with moderate levels of noise. The paper also emphasizes the relevance of minimalizing sequence of gates, and reduced circuit depth in an effort to preserve useful entanglement in present-day quantum hardware. These observations help in understanding the behaviour of quantum correlations better in real world quantum devices and provide a way of developing more resilient quantum algorithms that would work on NISQ systems. In general, the article offers a systematic view on entanglement behavior in disordered quantum systems and highlights its value in the development of quantum computing applications in the near term.
In the current era of Noisy Intermediate-Scale Quantum (NISQ) technology, the practical use of quantum computers remains inhibited by our inability to aptly decouple qubits from their environment to mitigate computational errors. In this work, we introduce an approach by which knowledge of a qubit's initial quantum state and the standard parameters describing its decoherence can be leveraged to mitigate the noise present during the execution of a single-qubit gate. We benchmark our protocol using cloud-based access to IBM quantum processors. On ibmq_rome, we demonstrate a reduction of the single-qubit error rate by 38%38\%38%, from 1.6×10−31.6 \times 10 ^{-3}1.6×10−3 to 1.0×10−31.0 \times 10 ^{-3}1.0×10−3, provided the initial state of the input qubit is known. On ibmq_bogota, we prove that our protocol will never decrease gate fidelity, provided the system's T1T_1T1​ and T2T_2T2​ times have not drifted above 100100100 times their assumed values. The protocol can be used to reduce quantum state preparation errors, as well as to improve the fidelity of quantum circuits for which some knowledge of the qubits' intermediate states can be inferred. This work presents a pathway to using information about noise levels and quantum state distributions to significantly reduce error rates associated with quantum gates via optimized decomposition into native gates.
Recent developments in quantum computers have been pushing up the number of qubits. However, the state-of-the-art Noisy Intermediate Scale Quantum (NISQ) computers still do not have enough qubits to accommodate the error correction circuit. Noise in quantum gates limits the reliability of quantum circuits. To characterize the noise effects, prior methods such as process tomography, gateset tomography and randomized benchmarking have been proposed. However, the challenge is that these methods do not scale well with the number of qubits. Noise models based on the understanding of underneath physics have also been proposed to study different kinds of noise in quantum computers. The difficulty is that there is no widely accepted noise model that incorporates all different kinds of errors. The realworld errors can be very complicated and it remains an active area of research to produce accurate noise models. In this paper, instead of using noise models to estimate the reliability, which is measured with success rates or inference strength, we treat the NISQ quantum computer as a black box. We use several quantum circuit characteristics such as the number of qubits, circuit depth, the number of CNOT gates, and the connection topology of the quantum computer as inputs to the black box and derive a reliability estimation model using (1) polynomial fitting and (2) a shallow neural network. We propose randomized benchmarks with random numbers of qubits and basic gates to generate a large data set for neural network training. We show that the estimated reliability from our black-box model outperforms the noise models from Qiskit. We also showcase that our black-box model can be used to guide quantum circuit optimization at compile time.