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Probabilistic error cancellation with sparse Pauli–Lindblad models on noisy quantum processors

Nature Physics volume 19, pages 1116–1121 (2023)Cite this article

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Abstract

Noise in quantum computers can result in biased estimates of physical observables. Accurate bias-free estimates can be obtained using probabilistic error cancellation, an error-mitigation technique that effectively inverts well-characterized noise channels. Learning correlated noise channels in large quantum circuits, however, has been a major challenge and has severely hampered experimental realizations. Our work presents a practical protocol for learning and inverting a sparse noise model that is able to capture correlated noise and scales to large quantum devices. These advances allow us to demonstrate probabilistic error cancellation on a superconducting quantum processor, thereby providing a way to measure noise-free observables at larger circuit volumes.

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Fig. 1: Context of the noise model.
Fig. 2: Learning the noise channel.
Fig. 3: Error-mitigated time evolution of Ising spin chains.
Fig. 4: Mitigation sampling overhead.

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Data availability

Data are available from the authors upon reasonable request. Supplementary Fig. 7 in the supplementary information shows data representative of the performance of the cloud-based device ibm_hanoi, which is accessible online through the open-source Qiskit backend.

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Acknowledgements

We thank S. Bravyi, D. T. McClure and J. M. Gambetta for helpful discussions. Research in characterization and noise learning was sponsored in part by the Army Research Office and was accomplished under Grant Number W911NF-21-1-0002. The views and conclusions contained in this document are those of the authors and should not be interpreted as representing the official policies, either expressed or implied, of the Army Research Office or the US Government. The US Government is authorized to reproduce and distribute reprints for Government purposes notwithstanding any copyright notation herein.

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  1. IBM Quantum, IBM T.J. Watson Research Center, Yorktown Heights, NY, USA

    Ewout van den Berg, Zlatko K. Minev, Abhinav Kandala & Kristan Temme

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  1. Ewout van den Berg
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  2. Zlatko K. Minev
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  3. Abhinav Kandala
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  4. Kristan Temme
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Contributions

K.T. and E.B. developed the theory. E.B., Z.M. and A.K. ran the experiments. All authors designed the experiments, analysed the data and wrote the paper.

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Correspondence to Kristan Temme.

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Nature Physics thanks Ming Gong and Suguru Endo for their contribution to the peer review of this work.

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van den Berg, E., Minev, Z.K., Kandala, A. et al. Probabilistic error cancellation with sparse Pauli–Lindblad models on noisy quantum processors. Nat. Phys. 19, 1116–1121 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41567-023-02042-2

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