An official website of the United States government
Using IBM's publicly accessible quantum computers, we have analyzed the entropies of Schrödinger's cat states, which have the form Ψ = (1/2) 1/2 [|0 0 0⋯0〉 + |1 1 1⋯1〉]. We have obtained the average Shannon entropy S So of the distribution over measurement outcomes from 75 runs of 8192 shots, for each of the numbers of entangled qubits, on each of the quantum computers tested. For the distribution over N fault-free measurements on pure cat states, S So would approach one as N → ∞, independent of the number of qubits; but we have found that S So varies nearly linearly with the number of qubits n . The slope of S So versus the number of qubits differs among computers with the same quantum volumes. We have developed a two-parameter model that reproduces the near-linear dependence of the entropy on the number of qubits, based on the probabilities of observing the output 0 when a qubit is set to |0〉 and 1 when it is set to |1〉. The slope increases as the error rate increases. The slope provides a sensitive measure of the accuracy of a quantum computer, so it serves as a quickly determinable index of performance. We have used tomographic methods with error mitigation as described in the qiskit documentation to find the density matrix ρ and evaluate the von Neumann entropies of the cat states. From the reduced density matrices for individual qubits, we have calculated the entanglement entropies. The reduced density matrices represent mixed states with approximately 50/50 probabilities for states |0〉 and |1〉. The entanglement entropies are very close to one.
more »
« less
Bell inequalities for entangled qubits: quantitative tests of quantum character and nonlocality on quantum computers
This work provides quantitative tests of the extent of violation of two inequalities applicable to qubits coupled into Bell states, using IBM's publicly accessible quantum computers. Violations of the inequalities are well established. Our purpose is not to test the inequalities, but rather to determine how well quantum mechanical predictions can be reproduced on quantum computers, given their current fault rates. We present results for the spin projections of two entangled qubits, along three axes A , B , and C , with a fixed angle θ between A and B and a range of angles θ ′ between B and C . For any classical object that can be characterized by three observables with two possible values, inequalities govern relationships among the probabilities of outcomes for the observables, taken pairwise. From set theory, these inequalities must be satisfied by all such classical objects; but quantum systems may violate the inequalities. We have detected clear-cut violations of one inequality in runs on IBM's publicly accessible quantum computers. The Clauser–Horne–Shimony–Holt (CHSH) inequality governs a linear combination S of expectation values of products of spin projections, taken pairwise. Finding S > 2 rules out local, hidden variable theories for entangled quantum systems. We obtained values of S greater than 2 in our runs prior to error mitigation. To reduce the quantitative errors, we used a modification of the error-mitigation procedure in the IBM documentation. We prepared a pair of qubits in the state |00〉, found the probabilities to observe the states |00〉, |01〉, |10〉, and |11〉 in multiple runs, and used that information to construct the first column of an error matrix M . We repeated this procedure for states prepared as |01〉, |10〉, and |11〉 to construct the full matrix M , whose inverse is the filtering matrix. After applying filtering matrices to our averaged outcomes, we have found good quantitative agreement between the quantum computer output and the quantum mechanical predictions for the extent of violation of both inequalities as functions of θ ′.
more »
« less
- Award ID(s):
- 1900399
- PAR ID:
- 10271582
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Physical Chemistry Chemical Physics
- Volume:
- 23
- Issue:
- 11
- ISSN:
- 1463-9076
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 6370 to 6387
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
More Like this
-
-
Current noisy quantum computers have multiple types of errors, which can occur in the state preparation, measurement/readout, and gate operation, as well as intrinsic decoherence and relaxation. Partly motivated by the booming of intermediate-scale quantum processors, measurement and gate errors have been recently extensively studied, and several methods of mitigating them have been proposed and formulated in software packages (e.g., in IBM Qiskit). Despite this, the state preparation error and the procedure to quantify it have not yet been standardized, as state preparation and measurement errors are usually considered not directly separable. Inspired by a recent work of Laflamme, Lin, and Mor \cite{laflamme2022algorithmic}, we propose a simple and resource-efficient approach to quantify separately the state preparation and readout error rates. With these two errors separately quantified, we also propose methods to mitigate them separately, especially mitigating state preparation errors with linear (with the number of qubits) complexity. As a result of the separate mitigation, we show that the fidelity of the outcome can be improved by an order of magnitude compared to the standard measurement error mitigation scheme. We also show that the quantification and mitigation scheme is resilient against gate noise and can be immediately applied to current noisy quantum computers. To demonstrate this, we present results from cloud experiments on IBM's superconducting quantum computers. The results indicate that the state preparation error rate is also an important metric for qubit metrology that can be efficiently obtained.more » « less
-
Abstract Quantum computers are promising tools for simulating many-body quantum systems due to their potential scaling advantage over classical computers. While significant effort has been expended on many-fermion systems, here we simulate a model entangled many-boson system with the contracted quantum eigensolver (CQE). We generalize the CQE to many-boson systems by encoding the bosonic wavefunction on qubits. The CQE provides a compact ansatz for the bosonic wave function whose gradient is proportional to the residual of a contracted Schrödinger equation. We apply the CQE to a bosonic system, whereNquantum harmonic oscillators are coupled through a pairwise quadratic repulsion. The model is relevant to the study of coupled vibrations in molecular systems on quantum devices. Results demonstrate the potential efficiency of the CQE in simulating bosonic processes such as molecular vibrations with good accuracy and convergence even in the presence of noise.more » « less
-
null (Ed.)Due to the unreliability and limited capacity of existing quantum computer prototypes, quantum circuit simulation continues to be a vital tool for validating next generation quantum computers and for studying variational quantum algorithms, which are among the leading candidates for useful quantum computation. Existing quantum circuit simulators do not address the common traits of variational algorithms, namely: 1) their ability to work with noisy qubits and operations, 2) their repeated execution of the same circuits but with different parameters, and 3) the fact that they sample from circuit final wavefunctions to drive a classical optimization routine. We present a quantum circuit simulation toolchain based on logical abstractions targeted for simulating variational algorithms. Our proposed toolchain encodes quantum amplitudes and noise probabilities in a probabilistic graphical model, and it compiles the circuits to logical formulas that support efficient repeated simulation of and sampling from quantum circuits for different parameters. Compared to state-of-the-art state vector and density matrix quantum circuit simulators, our simulation approach offers greater performance when sampling from noisy circuits with at least eight to 20 qubits and with around 12 operations on each qubit, making the approach ideal for simulating near-term variational quantum algorithms. And for simulating noise-free shallow quantum circuits with 32 qubits, our simulation approach offers a 66X reduction in sampling cost versus quantum circuit simulation techniques based on tensor network contraction.more » « less
-
There is a significant interest in testing quantum entanglement and Bell inequality violation in high-energy experiments. Since the analyses in high-energy experiments are performed with events statistically averaged over phase space, the states used to determine observables depend on the choice of coordinates through an event-dependent basis and are thus not genuine quantum states, but rather “fictitious states.” We find that the basis which diagonalizes the spin-spin correlations is optimal for constructing fictitious states to test the violation of Bell’s inequality. This result is applied directly to the bipartite qubit system of a top and antitop produced at a hadron collider. We show that the beam axis is the optimal basis choice near the threshold production for measuring Bell inequality violation, while at high transverse momentum the basis that aligns along the momentum direction of the top is optimal. Published by the American Physical Society2024more » « less
- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
-
Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Journal Article:
- https://doi.org/10.1039/d0cp05444e
