Temporal Noise Analysis and Filtering for Superconducting Quantum Circuits

Abstract

Quantum computing holds the promise of transforming computational paradigms across science and engineering. But realizing potential on near term hardware demands on understanding of the noise processes that corrupt quantum circuit outputs. On superconducting processors, fragile qubits are continuously subjected to environmental disturbances including $T_1$ relaxation, charge noise, and magnetic flux drift that cause measurement statistics to evolve in a nonstationary manner across repeated circuit executions, undermining the reliability of any result aggregated over a long experimental session. In this work, we treat the sequence of bitstring count outcomes from repeated executions of a fixed quantum circuit as a time series and conduct a systematic statistical investigation of its structure. The first contribution is constructing a predictive model of circuit output, demonstrating that future measurement outcomes can be forecast by exploiting temporal correlations in the execution record. We then extend the analysis to two circuits sharing the same physical qubit, examining cross-series dependencies and evaluating whether the drift behavior of one circuit can inform predictions about the other. The temporal structure of the signals is characterized in depth. The other contribution of this dissertation is to perform Wavelet-based multifractal analysis to reveal that quantum circuit outputs exhibit genuine multifractality. This is a hallmark of long range correlated, scale free processes rather than the simple Gaussian white noise assumed by standard error models. Complementary frequency-domain analysis identifies a residual $1/f$ noise component that persists after linear detrending, consistent with charge and flux noise mechanisms well documented in superconducting qubit literature. Motivated by these findings, The other contribution is to design and evaluate a suite of drift-mitigation filters including piecewise Huber regression, rolling median, smoothing spline, and Savitzky–Golay approaches under a rigorous chronological train/test protocol that mimics real operational deployment. The smoothing spline and median filter achieve near-zero corrected bias, while the rolling median emerges as the preferred solution for online, shot-by-shot correction due to its causal update structure and maximal robustness to impulsive hardware events. Taken together, our results characterize quantum circuit outputs as non-stationary, multifractal processes exhibiting long memory, seasonality, and inter-circuit causality, and establish a principled filtering framework for mitigating temporal bias drift in NISQ era quantum hardware.