Abstract: From Error Mitigation to Error Correction: A Continuous Path
Speaker: Matthias Steffen
How do we deal with errors in quantum mechanics? We trade resources measured in the form of complexity, number of qubits, and runtime for reduced impact of errors. Quantum Error Correction (QEC) generally trades number of qubits and runtime along with classical processing (syndrome matching) to reduce effective errors rates. Owing to the significant overhead associated with planar QEC codes, practical error correction still requires major technical advances likely requiring years of further study. On the other hand, quantum error mitigation trades runtime as measured by the number of quantum circuit executions for reduced errors when measuring expectation values. Simulations suggest that noise free estimates of 100 qubit circuits at depth 100 are realizable with physical error rates at 1e-4, repetition rates of 1kHz, and a total runtime of a day. This significantly raises the prospects for potential quantum advantage well before fault-tolerant quantum computing. In this talk we will discuss the current status of error mitigation including results with up 50 qubits.