Average circuit eigenvalue sampling on NISQ devices
Average circuit eigenvalue sampling (ACES) was introduced by Flammia in
arXiv:2108.05803 as a protocol to characterize the Pauli error channels of
individual gates across the device simultaneously. The original paper posed
using ACES to characterize near-term devices as an open problem. This work
advances in this direction by presenting a full implementation of ACES for real
devices and deploying it to Superstaq arXiv:2309.05157, along with a
device-tailored resource estimation obtained through simulations and
experiments. Our simulations show that ACES is able to estimate one- and
two-qubit non-uniform Pauli error channels to an average eigenvalue absolute
error of under $0.003$ and total variation distance of under 0.001 between
simulated and reconstructed probability distributions over Pauli errors with
$10^5$ shots per circuit using 5 circuits of depth 14. The question of
estimating general error channels through twirling techniques in real devices
remains open, as it is dependent on a device's native gates, but simulations
with the Clifford set show results in agreement with reported hardware data.
Experimental results on IBM's Algiers and Osaka devices are presented, where we
characterize their error channels as Pauli channels without twirling.
Emilio Pelaez Victory Omole Pranav Gokhale Rich Rines Kaitlin N. Smith Michael A. Perlin Akel Hashim