Kristel Michielsen

Recent advances in quantum computing have enabled the development of quantum processors with hundreds of qubits. However, noise continues to limit the amount of useful information that can be extracted from these systems, making it essential to identify the regime in which experimental outputs remain reliable. In this work, we benchmark Quantinuum Helios-1, a 98-qubit trapped-ion quantum processing unit, using the linear ramp quantum approximate optimization algorithm (LR-QAOA). To this end, we perform large-scale noiseless simulations on JUPITER, Europe's first exascale supercomputer, for circuits of up to 48 qubits and 3,384 two-qubit gates. These simulations, executed on 4,096 nodes equipped with 16,384 GH200 superchips and high-bandwidth CPU-GPU interconnects, provide a reference for validating experimental results at the edge of classical tractability. We find that, up to 48 qubits, Helios-1 remains in a noise-tolerant region, i.e., its samples cannot be clearly distinguished from those coming from a noiseless simulation. We then extend the analysis to larger system sizes using experimental data only, and apply a mean-of-means resampling procedure with a 3$σ$ threshold to determine whether the QPU output is statistically distinguishable from random sampling. This analysis identifies a regime of coherent performance up to 93 qubits (12,834 two-qubit gates), beyond which, at 95 qubits, the outputs become statistically indistinguishable from random sampling. These results demonstrate how exascale classical simulation can be used to validate quantum processors, and provide a quantitative boundary between noise-tolerant and random regimes in quantum processors.

As quantum processing units (QPUs) scale toward hundreds of qubits, diagnosing noise-induced correlations (crosstalk) becomes critical for reliable quantum computation. In this work, we introduce Zero-Entropy Classical Shadows (ZECS), a diagnostic tool that uses information of a rank-one quantum state tomography (QST) reconstruction from classical shadow (CS) information to make a crosstalk diagnosis. We use ZECS on trapped ion and superconductive QPUs, including ionq_forte (36 qubits), ibm_brisbane (127 qubits), and ibm_fez (156 qubits), using from 1,000 to 6,000 samples. With these samples, we use the ZECS to characterize crosstalk among disjoint qubit subsets across the full hardware. This information is then used to select low-crosstalk qubit subsets on ibm_fez for executing the Quantum Approximate Optimization Algorithm (QAOA) on a 20-qubit problem. Compared to the best qubit selection via Qiskit transpilation, our method improves solution quality by 10% and increases algorithmic coherence by 33%. ZECS offers a scalable and measurement-efficient approach to diagnosing crosstalk in large-scale QPUs.