Testing platform-independent quantum error mitigation on noisy quantum computers

Understand

We apply quantum error mitigation techniques to a variety of benchmark problems and quantum computers to evaluate the performance of quantum error mitigation in practice.

• To do so, we define an empirically motivated, resource-normalized metric of the improvement of error mitigation which we call the improvement factor, and calculate this metric for each experiment we perform.
• The experiments we perform consist of zero-noise extrapolation and probabilistic error cancellation applied to two benchmark problems run on IBM, IonQ, and Rigetti quantum computers, as well as noisy quantum computer simulators.
• Our results show that error mitigation is on average more beneficial than no error mitigation - even when normalized by the additional resources used - but also emphasize that the performance of quantum error mitigation depends on the underlying computer.