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Abstract Recently, several quantum benchmarking algorithms have been developed to characterize noisy quantum gates on today’s quantum devices. A fundamental issue in benchmarking is that not everything about quantum noise is learnable due to the existence of gauge freedom, leaving open the question what information is learnable and what is not, which is unclear even for a single CNOT gate. Here we give a precise characterization of the learnability of Pauli noise channels attached to Clifford gates using graph theoretical tools. Our results reveal the optimality of cycle benchmarking in the sense that it can extract all learnable information about Pauli noise. We experimentally demonstrate noise characterization of IBM’s CNOT gate up to 2 unlearnable degrees of freedom, for which we obtain bounds using physical constraints. In addition, we show that an attempt to extract unlearnable information by ignoring state preparation noise yields unphysical estimates, which is used to lower bound the state preparation noise. 

In this paper we initiate the study of entanglement-breaking (EB) superchannels. These are processes that always yield separable maps when acting on one side of a bipartite completely positive (CP) map. EB superchannels are a generalization of the well-known EB channels. We give several equivalent characterizations of EB supermaps and superchannels. Unlike its channel counterpart, we find that not every EB superchannel can be implemented as a measure-and-prepare superchannel. We also demonstrate that many EB superchannels can be superactivated, in the sense that they can output non-separable channels when wired in series.We then introduce the notions of CPTP- and CP-complete images of a superchannel, which capture deterministic and probabilistic channel convertibility, respectively. This allows us to characterize the power of EB superchannels for generating CP maps in different scenarios, and it reveals some fundamental differences between channels and superchannels. Finally, we relax the definition of separable channels to include ( p , q ) -non-entangling channels, which are bipartite channels that cannot generate entanglement using p - and q -dimensional ancillary systems. By introducing and investigating k -EB maps, we construct examples of ( p , q ) -EB superchannels that are not fully entanglement breaking. Partial results on the characterization of ( p , q ) -EB superchannels are also provided.