Testing platform-independent quantum error mitigation on noisy quantum computers

TL;DR

This paper evaluates the effectiveness of quantum error mitigation techniques across different quantum computers and benchmark problems, introducing a new metric to quantify improvements and demonstrating that mitigation generally enhances performance.

Contribution

The study applies and assesses quantum error mitigation methods on various hardware and simulators, introducing an empirically motivated metric to measure mitigation benefits normalized by resources.

Findings

Error mitigation improves results on average across tested devices.

Performance of error mitigation varies depending on the quantum computer.

The proposed improvement factor effectively quantifies mitigation benefits.

Abstract

We apply quantum error mitigation techniques to a variety of benchmark problems and quantum computers to evaluate the performance of quantum error mitigation in practice. To do so, we define an empirically motivated, resource-normalized metric of the improvement of error mitigation which we call the improvement factor, and calculate this metric for each experiment we perform. The experiments we perform consist of zero-noise extrapolation and probabilistic error cancellation applied to two benchmark problems run on IBM, IonQ, and Rigetti quantum computers, as well as noisy quantum computer simulators. Our results show that error mitigation is on average more beneficial than no error mitigation - even when normalized by the additional resources used - but also emphasize that the performance of quantum error mitigation depends on the underlying computer.