Efficient measurement of quantum gate error by interleaved randomized benchmarking

Understand

We describe a scalable experimental protocol for obtaining estimates of the error rate of individual quantum computational gates.

• This protocol, in which random Clifford gates are interleaved between a gate of interest, provides a bounded estimate of the average error of the gate under test so long as the average variation of the noise affecting the full set of Clifford gates is small.
• This technique takes into account both state preparation and measurement errors and is scalable in the number of qubits.
• We apply this protocol to a superconducting qubit system and find gate errors that compare favorably with the gate errors extracted via quantum process tomography.