A Quantum Performance Simulator based on fidelity and fault-path counting

TL;DR

This paper introduces a quantum performance simulator that automates fault path tracking and fidelity estimation to evaluate the effectiveness of fault-tolerant quantum protocols on universal hardware, providing practical metrics like error rates and resource requirements.

Contribution

The work presents a novel simulation scheme that efficiently estimates error bounds and performance metrics for fault-tolerant quantum computation, especially at low error rates where traditional methods struggle.

Findings

Simulated quantum adders as a case study for performance evaluation.

The simulator effectively estimates error probabilities and resource needs.

Provides a practical tool for assessing quantum hardware performance.

Abstract

Quantum performance simulators can provide practical metrics for the effectiveness of executing theoretical quantum information processing protocols on physical hardware. In this work we present a scheme to simulate the performance of fault tolerant quantum computation by automating the tracking of common fault paths for error propagation through a circuit and quantifying the fidelity of each qubit throughout the computation. Our simulation tool outputs the expected execution time, required number of qubits and the final error rate of running common fault tolerant protocols on a universal hardware, assumed to be a network of qubits with full connectivity. Our technique efficiently estimates the upper bound of error probability and provides a useful performance measure of the error threshold at low error rates where conventional Monte Carlo methods are ineffective. To verify the proposed simulator, we present simulation results comparing the execution of quantum adders which constitute a major part of Shor's algorithm.