Performance of Domain-Wall Encoding for Quantum Annealing

In this article, we experimentally test the performance of the recently proposed domain-wall encoding of discrete variables Chancellor, 2019, on Ising model flux qubit quantum annealers. We compare this encoding with the traditional one-hot methods and find that they outperform the one-hot encoding for three different problems at different sizes of both the problem and […]

Reducing the Depth of Linear Reversible Quantum Circuits

In quantum computing the decoherence time of the qubits determines the computation time available, and this time is very limited when using current hardware. In this article, we minimize the execution time (the depth) for a class of circuits referred to as linear reversible circuits, which has many applications in quantum computing (e.g., stabilizer circuits, […]

Single-Qubit Fidelity Assessment of Quantum Annealing Hardware

As a wide variety of quantum computing platforms become available, methods for assessing and comparing the performance of these devices are of increasing interest and importance. Inspired by the success of single-qubit error rate computations for tracking the progress of gate-based quantum computers, this work proposes a quantum annealing single-qubit assessment (QASA) protocol for quantifying […]

Benchmarking Quantum Coprocessors in an Application-Centric, Hardware-Agnostic, and Scalable Way

Existing protocols for benchmarking current quantum coprocessors fail to meet the usual standards for assessing the performance of high-performance-computing platforms. After a synthetic review of these protocols—whether at the gate, circuit, or application level—we introduce a new benchmark, dubbed Atos Q-score, which is application-centric, hardware-agnostic, and scalable to quantum advantage processor sizes and beyond. The […]

Survey on Quantum Circuit Compilation for Noisy Intermediate-Scale Quantum Computers: Artificial Intelligence to Heuristics

Computationally expensive applications, including machine learning, chemical simulations, and financial modeling, are promising candidates for noisy intermediate scale quantum (NISQ) computers. In these problems, one important challenge is mapping a quantum circuit onto NISQ hardware while satisfying physical constraints of an underlying quantum architecture. Quantum circuit compilation (QCC) aims to generate feasible mappings such that […]

Exploiting Symmetry Reduces the Cost of Training QAOA

A promising approach to the practical application of the quantum approximate optimization algorithm (QAOA) is finding QAOA parameters classically in simulation and sampling the solutions from QAOA with optimized parameters on a quantum computer. Doing so requires repeated evaluations of QAOA energy in simulation. In this article, we propose a novel approach for accelerating the […]

Quantum Algorithms for Mixed Binary Optimization Applied to Transaction Settlement

In this article, we extend variational quantum optimization algorithms for quadratic unconstrained binary optimization problems to the class of mixed binary optimization problems. This allows us to combine binary decision variables with continuous decision variables, which, for instance, enables the modeling of inequality constraints via slack variables. We propose two heuristics and introduce the transaction […]

Distributed Quantum Computing and Network Control for Accelerated VQE

Interconnecting small quantum computers will be essential in the future for creating large-scale, robust quantum computers. Methods for distributing monolithic quantum algorithms efficiently are, thus, needed. In this article, we consider an approach for distributing the accelerated variational quantum eigensolver algorithm over arbitrary sized—in terms of number of qubits—distributed quantum computers. We consider approaches for […]

High-Fidelity Control of Superconducting Qubits Using Direct Microwave Synthesis in Higher Nyquist Zones

Control electronics for superconducting quantum processors have strict requirements for accurate command of the sensitive quantum states of their qubits. Hinging on the purity of ultra-phase-stable oscillators to upconvert very-low-noise baseband pulses, conventional control systems can become prohibitively complex and expensive when scaling to larger quantum devices, especially as high sampling rates become desirable for […]

A Hardware-Aware Heuristic for the Qubit Mapping Problem in the NISQ Era

Due to several physical limitations in the realization of quantum hardware, today’s quantum computers are qualified as noisy intermediate-scale quantum (NISQ) hardware. NISQ hardware is characterized by a small number of qubits (50 to a few hundred) and noisy operations. Moreover, current realizations of superconducting quantum chips do not have the ideal all-to-all connectivity between […]