Methods for measuring noise, purity changes, and entanglement entropy in quantum devices and systems

TL;DR

This paper introduces scalable methods for measuring noise, purity changes, and entanglement entropy in quantum systems, enabling better assessment of quantum device quality and dissipation effects.

Contribution

The authors propose novel, scalable protocols for quantifying dissipation, purity, and entanglement dynamics in quantum circuits, applicable to NISQ devices.

Findings

Method effectively measures purity change rates.

Protocol identifies dissipation hotspots.

Enables entanglement buildup measurement.

Abstract

We present methods for evaluating the rate of change in quantities during quantum evolution due to coupling to the environment (dissipation hereafter). The protocol is based on repeating a given quantum circuit (or quantum operation) twice, thrice, and so on, and measuring an expectation value after each number of repetitions. We start by applying this method for measuring the rate of purity changes in quantum circuits. This provides direct information on the quality of the circuit. Furthermore, the presented scheme enables to distill the dissipative contribution in the changes of quantities such as energies and coherence. In particular, this can be applied to the local Hamiltonians of specific qubits. Thus, our approach can be used to locate "hotspots" where the dissipation takes place. A variant of this method can be used to measure the entanglement buildup in quantum circuits. These methods are scalable as they involve only a few observables which are relatively easy to measure in NISQ devices.