2018/10/24 by Mingyu Sun, Sun, Mingyu, Michael R. Geller +1 · 1 citation
Computer Science · Engineering · Physics and Astronomy · #Advancements in Semiconductor Devices and Circuit Design #FOS: Physical sciences #Quantum Computing Algorithms and Architecture #Quantum Physics (quant-ph) #Quantum and electron transport phenomena #quant-ph
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.1810.10523
This manuscript is superseded by 2001.09980
openalex publication_date 2018/10/24 · arxiv created 2020/07/14 · arxiv updated 2020/07/16 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
State preparation and measurement (SPAM) errors limit the performance of many gate-based quantum computing architecures, but are partly correctable after a calibration step that requires, for an exact implementation on a register of n qubits, 2n additional characterization experiments, as well as classical post-processing. Here we introduce an approximate but efficient method for SPAM error characterization requiring the \it classical processing of 2n × 2n real matrices, but only O(n2) measurements. The technique assumes that multi-qubit measurement errors are dominated by pair correlations, which are estimated with n(n-1)k/2 two-qubit experiments, where k is a parameter related to the accuracy. We demonstrate the technique on the IBM and Rigetti online superconducting quantum computers, allowing comparison of their SPAM errors in both magnitude and degree of correlation. We also study the correlations as a function of the register's geometric layout. We find that the pair-correlation model is fairly accurate on linear arrays of superconducting qubits. However qubits arranged in more closely spaced two-dimensional geometries exhibit significant higher-order (such as 3-qubit) SPAM error correlations.