Error mitigation increases the effective quantum volume of quantum computers

Understand

Quantum volume is a single-number metric which, loosely speaking, reports the number of usable qubits on a quantum computer.

• While improvements to the underlying hardware are a direct means of increasing quantum volume, the metric is "full-stack" and has also been increased by improvements to software, notably compilers.
• We extend this latter direction by demonstrating that error mitigation, a type of indirect compilation, increases the effective quantum volume of several quantum computers.
• Importantly, this increase occurs while taking the same number of overall samples.