Is error detection helpful on IBM 5Q chips?

Abstract

This paper reports on experiments realized on several IBM~5Q chips which show evidence for the advantage of using error detection and fault-tolerant design of quantum circuits. We show an average improvement of the task of sampling from states that can be fault-tolerantly prepared in the [4,2,2] code, when using a fault-tolerant technique well suited to the layout of the chip. By showing that fault-tolerant quantum computation is already within our reach, the author hopes to encourage this approach.