Efficiently improving the performance of noisy quantum computers

Abstract

Using near-term quantum computers to achieve a quantum advantage requires efficient strategies to improve the performance of the noisy quantum devices presently available. We develop and experimentally validate two efficient error mitigation protocols named ``Noiseless Output Extrapolation" and ``Pauli Error Cancellation" that can drastically enhance the performance of quantum circuits composed of noisy cycles of gates. By combining popular mitigation strategies such as probabilistic error cancellation and noise amplification with efficient noise reconstruction methods, our protocols can mitigate a wide range of noise processes that do not satisfy the assumptions underlying existing mitigation protocols, including non-local and gate-dependent processes. We test our protocols on a four-qubit superconducting processor at the Advanced Quantum Testbed. We observe significant improvements in the performance of both structured and random circuits, with up to <mml:math xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML"><mml:mn>86</mml:mn><mml:mi mathvariant="normal">&amp;#x0025;</mml:mi></mml:math> improvement in variation distance over the unmitigated outputs. Our experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our protocols, as well as their practicality for current hardware platforms.