A novel approach to noisy gates for simulating quantum computers

TL;DR

This paper introduces a new method for simulating noisy quantum gates that more accurately models environmental effects, aligning closely with analytical solutions and real quantum hardware behavior, especially for NISQ devices.

Contribution

The authors develop a flexible, efficient approach to incorporate Markovian noise into quantum gate simulations, improving accuracy over existing simulators like IBM Qiskit.

Findings

More accurate than IBM Qiskit in simulating noise

Aligns closely with Lindblad equation solutions

Effective for up to 18-qubit algorithms

Abstract

We present a novel method for simulating the noisy behaviour of quantum computers, which allows to efficiently incorporate environmental effects in the driven evolution implementing the gates acting on the qubits. We show how to modify the noiseless gate executed by the computer to include any Markovian noise, hence resulting in what we will call a noisy gate. We compare our method with the IBM Qiskit simulator, and show that it follows more closely both the analytical solution of the Lindblad equation as well as the behaviour of a real quantum computer, where we ran algorithms involving up to 18 qubits; as such, our protocol offers a more accurate simulator for NISQ devices. The method is flexible enough to potentially describe any noise, including non-Markovian ones. The noise simulator based on this work is available as a python package at this link: https://pypi.org/project/quantum-gates.