Preparation and Certification of an 18-Qubit GHZ State on an Open-Access Superconducting Quantum Processor Using Error-Aware Compilation and Readout Mitigation
Greenberger-Horne-Zeilinger (GHZ) states are a widely used benchmark for studying multipartite entanglement and coherence in quantum processors. In this work, GHZ states of increasing size were prepared on the 156-qubit IBM Quantum processor ibm_marrakesh and certified using a fidelity-based entanglement witness. State coherence was extracted from parity-oscillation measurements using the multiple-quantum-coherence method. The study investigates how a combination of practical error-reduction techniques affects the largest GHZ state that can be certified on open-access superconducting hardware. These techniques include depth-minimized entangling trees, calibration-aware qubit selection, dynamical decoupling with gate and measurement twirling, and matrix-free readout-error mitigation. A naive implementation fails at larger system sizes, while depth-optimized preparation certifies entanglement up to 14 qubits. Calibration-aware qubit selection extends this to 16 qubits, and readout-error mitigation enables certification of genuine multipartite entanglement up to 18 qubits with a measured fidelity exceeding the witness threshold. The results show that the achievable certification size is determined primarily by the quality of the selected qubit region rather than by the total number of qubits available on the processor. The observed non-monotonic dependence of fidelity on system size reflects variations in local device performance. These findings illustrate the impact of hardware-aware compilation and error-mitigation strategies on entanglement certification using publicly accessible quantum computing platforms.
Greenberger-Horne-Zeilinger (GHZ) states are a widely used benchmark for studying multipartite entanglement and coherence in quantum processors. In this work, GHZ states of increasing size were prepared on the 156-qubit IBM Quantum processor ibm_marrakesh and certified using a fidelity-based entanglement witness. State coherence was extracted from parity-oscillation measurements using the multiple-quantum-coherence method. The study investigates how a combination of practical error-reduction techniques affects the largest GHZ state that can be certified on open-access superconducting hardware. These techniques include depth-minimized entangling trees, calibration-aware qubit selection, dynamical decoupling with gate and measurement twirling, and matrix-free readout-error mitigation. A naive implementation fails at larger system sizes, while depth-optimized preparation certifies entanglement up to 14 qubits. Calibration-aware qubit selection extends this to 16 qubits, and readout-error mitigation enables certification of genuine multipartite entanglement up to 18 qubits with a measured fidelity exceeding the witness threshold. The results show that the achievable certification size is determined primarily by the quality of the selected qubit region rather than by the total number of qubits available on the processor. The observed non-monotonic dependence of fidelity on system size reflects variations in local device performance. These findings illustrate the impact of hardware-aware compilation and error-mitigation strategies on entanglement certification using publicly accessible quantum computing platforms.
Abstract Generating and detecting genuine multipartite entanglement (GME) of sizeable quantum states prepared on physical devices is an important benchmark for highlighting the progress of near-term quantum computers. A common approach to certify GME is to prepare a Greenberger-Horne-Zeilinger (GHZ) state and measure a GHZ fidelity of at least 0.5. We measure the fidelities using multiple quantum coherences of GHZ states on 11 to 27 qubits prepared on the IBM Quantum ibmq_montreal device. Combinations of quantum readout error mitigation (QREM) and parity verification error detection are applied to the states. A fidelity of 0.546 ± 0.017 was recorded for a 27-qubit GHZ state when QREM was used, demonstrating GME across the full device with a confidence level of 98.6%. We benchmarked the effect of parity verification on GHZ fidelity for two GHZ state preparation embeddings on the heavy-hexagon architecture. The results show that the effect of parity verification, while relatively modest, led to a detectable improvement of GHZ fidelity.
As quantum technology advances and the size of quantum computers grow, it becomes increasingly important to understand the extent of quality in the devices. As large-scale entanglement is a quantum resource crucial for achieving quantum advantage, the challenge in its generation makes it a valuable benchmark for measuring the performance of universal quantum devices. In this paper, we study entanglement in Greenberger-Horne-Zeilinger (GHZ) and graph states prepared on the range of IBM Quantum devices. We generate GHZ states and investigate their coherence times with respect to state size and dynamical decoupling techniques. A GHZ fidelity of 0.519 ± 0.014 is measured on a 32-qubit GHZ state, certifying its genuine multipartite entanglement (GME). We show a substantial improvement in GHZ decoherence rates for a seven-qubit GHZ state after implementing dynamical decoupling, and observe a linear trend in the decoherence rate of α = ( 7.13 N + 5.54 ) × 10 − 3 µ s − 1 for up to N = 15 qubits, confirming the absence of superdecoherence. Additionally, we prepare and characterize fully bipartite entangled native-graph states on 22 superconducting quantum devices with qubit counts as high as 414 qubits, all active qubits of the 433-qubit IBM Osprey device. Analysis of the decay of two-qubit entanglement within the prepared states shows suppression of coherent noise signals with the implementation of dynamical decoupling techniques. Additionally, we observe that the entanglement in some qubit pairs oscillates over time, which is likely caused by residual ZZ-interactions. Characterizing entanglement in native-graph states, along with detecting entanglement oscillations, can be an effective approach to low-level device benchmarking that encapsulates two-qubit error rates along with additional sources of noise, with possible applications to quantum circuit compilation. We develop several tools to automate the preparation and entanglement characterization of GHZ and graph states. In particular, a method to characterize graph state bipartite entanglement using just 36 circuits, constant with respect to the number of qubits. Published by the American Physical Society 2024
I report a hands-on, systematic investigation of Greenberger–Horne–Zeilinger (GHZ) state generation on a 127-qubit supercon-ducting quantum processor, covering system sizes from 4 to 80 qubits. I measured both computational-basis populations andglobal Pauli-X parity oscillations to decompose the state fidelity into its population purity and phase-coherence components. Mydata reveal an exponential collapse of fidelity with qubit number: a 4-qubit GHZ state achieves a fidelity of F = 0.9307, wellabove the threshold for entanglement-based quantum key distribution, yet by 32 qubits the fidelity has plummeted to 0.0963 andthe parity signal is extinguished. At 80 qubits, the state is indistinguishable from a maximally mixed state (F = 0.0453). I isolatethe dominant noise channels—CNOT gate errors, dephasing, readout crosstalk—and map the current usability frontier for rawmultipartite entanglement. I then contrast my results with mitigation-enhanced benchmarks from other platforms, showing thatadaptive compilation and dynamical decoupling can recover fidelity above the genuine multipartite entanglement (GME) thresholdeven at 120 qubits. This work provides a deeply personal, quantitative perspective on the challenges and near-term solutions forscaling entanglement in quantum communication, sensing, and error-mitigated computation.
Multipartite Bell tests provide a correlation-only route to benchmarking quantum processors, but their application at large scales is hindered by the rapid decay of many-body correlators under noise and exponentially many terms in conventional Bell expressions. Here we address these scalability obstacles by introducing a finite-setting generalized Mermin family of state-tailored Bell inequalities with analytic certification bounds, in which the measurement-setting number m provides an additional certification dimension complementary to the system size n. We show that, for the powers-of-two setting choices considered here, increasing m leaves the ideal normalized multipartite quantum value unchanged while lowering the relevant classical bounds, thereby strengthening the Bell-violation ratios and yielding an improved noise-robustness scaling compared to the standard Mermin inequality. We test this construction experimentally on a programmable superconducting processor by preparing Greenberger-Horne-Zeilinger (GHZ) states of up to 80 qubits. Using randomized sampling for direct Bell-operator estimation, we observe Bell ratios that grow exponentially with system size, certify a nonlocality depth of 14, and show that increasing m strengthens both the Bell ratio and depth certification. All results are obtained solely from measured correlators and analytical bounds, without readout correction, tomography, or model-based mitigation. Generalized Mermin inequalities therefore provide a sharper Bell benchmark for noisy large-scale GHZ states.
Entanglement is the quintessential quantum phenomenon and a key enabler of quantum algorithms. The ability to faithfully entangle many distinct particles is often used as a benchmark for the quality of hardware and control in a quantum computer. Greenberger-Horne-Zeilinger (GHZ) states, also known as Schrödinger cat states, are useful for this task. They are easy to verify, but difficult to prepare due to their high sensitivity to noise. In this Letter we report on the largest GHZ state prepared to date consisting of 120 superconducting qubits. We do this via a combination of optimized compilation, low-overhead error detection and temporary uncomputation. We use an automated compiler to maximize error-detection in state preparation circuits subject to arbitrary qubit connectivity constraints and variations in error rates. We measure a GHZ fidelity of 0.56(3) with a post-selection rate of 28%. We certify the fidelity of our GHZ states using multiple methods and show that they are all equivalent, albeit with different practical considerations.
The resource overhead required to achieve net computational benefits from quantum error correction (QEC) limits its utility while current systems remain constrained in size, despite exceptional progress in experimental demonstrations. In this paper, we demonstrate that the strategic application of QEC primitives without logical encoding can yield significant advantages on superconducting processors—relative to any alternative error-reduction strategy—while only requiring a modest overhead. We first present a novel protocol for implementing long-range gates that relies on a unitarily prepared Greenberger-Horne-Zeilinger (GHZ) state as well as a unitary disentangling step; the protocol natively introduces an error-detection process using the disentangled qubits as flags. We demonstrate that it achieves state-of-the-art gate fidelities of over 85% across up to 40 lattice sites, significantly and consistently outperforming the best alternative measurement-based protocol without introducing any additional ancilla qubits. We then apply sparse stabilizer measurements to generate large GHZ states by detecting bit-flip and amplitude-damping errors. Employing this technique in combination with deterministic error suppression, we generate a 75-qubit GHZ state exhibiting genuine multipartite entanglement, the largest reported to date. The generation requires no more than 9 ancilla qubits and the fraction of samples discarded due to errors grows no higher than 78%, far lower than previous discard fractions required for tests using comparable numbers of fully encoded qubits. This work in total represents compelling evidence that adopting QEC primitives on current-generation devices can deliver substantial net benefits.