Linear Cross Entropy Benchmarking with Clifford Circuits

Understand

With the advent of quantum processors exceeding $100$ qubits and the high engineering complexities involved, there is a need for holistically benchmarking the processor to have quality assurance.

• Linear cross-entropy benchmarking (XEB) has been used extensively for systems with $50$ or more qubits but is fundamentally limited in scale due to the exponentially large computational resources required for classical simulation.
• In this work we propose conducting linear XEB with Clifford circuits, a scheme we call Clifford XEB.
• Since Clifford circuits can be simulated in polynomial time, Clifford XEB can be scaled to much larger systems.