Efficient separate quantification of state preparation errors and measurement errors on quantum computers and their mitigation
C. N. Yang Institute for Theoretical Physics, State University of New York at Stony Brook, Stony Brook, NY 11794-3840, USA
Department of Physics and Astronomy, State University of New York at Stony Brook, Stony Brook, NY 11794-3800, USA
| Published: | 2025-05-05, volume 9, page 1724 |
| Editor: | Philipp Schindler |
| Eprint: | arXiv:2310.18881v2 |
| Doi: | https://doi.org/10.22331/q-2025-05-05-1724 |
| Citation: | Quantum 9, 1724 (2025). |
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Abstract
Current noisy quantum computers have multiple types of errors, which can occur in the state preparation, measurement/readout, and gate operation, as well as intrinsic decoherence and relaxation. Partly motivated by the booming of intermediate-scale quantum processors, measurement and gate errors have been recently extensively studied, and several methods of mitigating them have been proposed and formulated in software packages (e.g., in IBM Qiskit). Despite this, the state preparation error and the procedure to quantify it have not yet been standardized, as state preparation and measurement errors are usually considered not directly separable. Inspired by a recent work of Laflamme, Lin, and Mor [15], we propose a simple and resource-efficient approach to quantify separately the state preparation and readout error rates. With these two errors separately quantified, we also propose methods to mitigate them separately, especially mitigating state preparation errors with linear (with the number of qubits) complexity. As a result of the separate mitigation, we show that the fidelity of the outcome can be improved by an order of magnitude compared to the standard measurement error mitigation scheme. We also show that the quantification and mitigation scheme is resilient against gate noise and can be immediately applied to current noisy quantum computers. To demonstrate this, we present results from cloud experiments on IBM's superconducting quantum computers. The results indicate that the state preparation error rate is also an important metric for qubit metrology that can be efficiently obtained.
Featured image: (left) The quantification circuits for the separating the state-preparation errors and measurement errors. (right) The mitigation circuits for state-preparation errors.
Popular summary
In this work, we propose an approach to quantify separately the state-preparation error and the measurement error, as well as the approach to mitigate them separately. The quantification method is inspired from algorithmic cooling but with great simplification and much less requirement for qubit resources. Upon the quantified results for the state preparation error, we also propose a new method to efficiently mitigate them separately. Our quantification and mitigation methods may further reduce the error and increase the accuracy of data from current noisy quantum computers.
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