Adverse Impacts of NISQ Hardware Qubit Errors on Nuclear Physics Applications

One of the most problematic issues that limits the implementation of applications on today's Noisy Intermediate Scale Quantum (NISQ) machines is the impact of qubit errors. Reliance on standard or minimal one and two qubit error measurements from processes such as randomized benchmarking and other similar protocols cannot reliably identify and capture the full impact of these errors. This is a critical problem because coherent qubit errors may degrade the user application results in an unpredictable manner and may compromise efforts to validate the accuracy of applications implemented on these NISQ quantum processors. We report here on an in-depth study of this issue using a transverse Ising model Hamiltonian as a sample user application test case implemented on an IBM Quantum Network superconducting transmon hardware platform using cycle benchmarking. Measurements of inter-day and intra-day qubit calibration drift and placement of the quantum circuit on separate qubit groups in different physical locations on the processor are presented. These results are discussed in the context Nuclear Physics applications implemented on these quantum computing hardware platforms.