Scalable randomized benchmarking of non-Clifford gates

ORAL

Abstract

Randomized benchmarking is a widely used experimental technique to characterize the average error of quantum operations. Benchmarking procedures that scale to enable characterization of $n$-qubit circuits rely on efficient procedures for manipulating those circuits and, as such, have been limited to subgroups of the Clifford group. However, universal quantum computers require additional, non-Clifford gates to approximate arbitrary unitary transformations. We define a scalable randomized benchmarking procedure over $n$-qubit unitary matrices that correspond to protected non-Clifford gates for a class of stabilizer codes. We present efficient methods for representing and composing group elements, sampling them uniformly, and synthesizing corresponding $\mathrm{poly}(n)$-sized circuits. The procedure provides experimental access to two independent parameters that together characterize the average gate fidelity of a group element.

*We acknowledge support from ARO under contract W911NF-14-1-0124.

Authors

  • Andrew Cross

    • IBM T J Watson Res Ctr
  • Easwar Magesan

    • IBM T.J. Watson Research Center, Yorktown Heights NY, USA
    • IBM T J Watson Res Ctr
    • IBM TJ Watson Research Center
  • Lev Bishop

    • IBM T J Watson Res Ctr
  • John Smolin

    • IBM T J Watson Res Ctr
  • Jay Gambetta

    • IBM T J Watson Res Ctr
    • IBM T.J. Watson Research Center, Yorktown Heights NY, USA