Measurement Error Mitigation in Quantum Computers Through Classical Bit-Flip Correction

TL;DR

This paper introduces a classical bit-flip correction technique to significantly reduce measurement errors in quantum computers, applicable to various operators and hardware, demonstrated on the Ising model and IBM quantum devices.

Contribution

The paper presents a novel, generalizable classical correction method for measurement errors in quantum computing, effective across different operators and hardware configurations.

Findings

Reduces measurement error by up to tenfold on quantum hardware.

Successfully applied to ground-state energy estimation of the Ising model.

Effective for arbitrary operators and scalable with polynomial overhead.

Abstract

We develop a classical bit-flip correction method to mitigate measurement errors on quantum computers. This method can be applied to any operator, any number of qubits, and any realistic bit-flip probability. We first demonstrate the successful performance of this method by correcting the noisy measurements of the ground-state energy of the longitudinal Ising model. We then generalize our results to arbitrary operators and test our method both numerically and experimentally on IBM quantum hardware. As a result, our correction method reduces the measurement error on the quantum hardware by up to one order of magnitude. We finally discuss how to pre-process the method and extend it to other errors sources beyond measurement errors. For local Hamiltonians, the overhead costs are polynomial in the number of qubits, even if multi-qubit correlations are included.