Benchmarking Hamiltonian Noise in the D-Wave Quantum Annealer

Various sources of noise limit the performance of quantum computers by altering qubit states in an uncontrolled manner throughout computations and reducing their coherence time. In quantum annealers, this noise introduces additional fluctuations to the parameters defining the original problem Hamiltonian, such that they find the ground states of problems perturbed from those originally programmed. […]

Finding Small and Large k-Clique Instances on a Quantum Computer

Algorithms for triangle finding, the smallest nontrivial instance of the k -clique problem, have been proposed for quantum computers. Still, those algorithms assume the use of fixed access time quantum RAM. In this article, we present a practical gate-based approach to both the triangle-finding problem and its NP-hard k -clique generalization. We examine both constant factors for near-term implementation […]

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 […]

Preparing Dicke States on a Quantum Computer

Exact requirement of controlled NOT (CNOT) and single-qubit gates to implement a quantum algorithm in a given architecture is one of the central problems in this computational paradigm. In this article, we take a tutorial approach in explaining the preparation of Dicke states (|D k n 〉) using concise realizations of partially defined unitary transformations. We show how […]

Quantum Approximate Optimization With Parallelizable Gates

The quantum approximate optimization algorithm (QAOA) has been introduced as a heuristic digital quantum computing scheme to find approximate solutions of combinatorial optimization problems. We present a scheme to parallelize this approach for arbitrary all-to-all connected problem graphs in a layout of quantum bits (qubits) with nearest-neighbor interactions. The protocol consists of single qubit operations […]

Voltage-Tunable Superconducting Resonators: A Platform for Random Access Quantum Memory

In computing architectures, one important factor is the tradeoff between the need to couple bits of information (quantum or classical) to each other and to an external drive and the need to isolate them well enough in order to protect the information for an extended period of time. In the case of superconducting quantum circuits, […]

Toward Quantum Gate-Model Heuristics for Real-World Planning Problems

Many challenging scheduling, planning, and resource allocation problems come with real-world input data and hard problem constraints, and reduce to optimizing a cost function over a combinatorially defined feasible set, such as colorings of a graph. Toward tackling such problems with quantum computers using quantum approximate optimization algorithms, we present novel efficient quantum alternating operator […]

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 […]

Logical Clifford Synthesis for Stabilizer Codes

Quantum error-correcting codes are used to protect qubits involved in quantum computation. This process requires logical operators to be translated into physical operators acting on physical quantum states. In this article, we propose a mathematical framework for synthesizing physical circuits that implement logical Clifford operators for stabilizer codes. Circuit synthesis is enabled by representing the […]

Experimental Characterization, Modeling, and Analysis of Crosstalk in a Quantum Computer

In this article, we present the experimental characterization of crosstalk in quantum information processor using idle tomography and simultaneous randomized benchmarking. We quantify both “quantum” and “classical” crosstalk in the device and analyze quantum circuits considering crosstalk. We show that simulation considering only gate-error deviates from experimental results up to 27%, whereas simulation considering both […]