Reece Robertson

A fully fault-tolerant implementation of the quantum error-detecting Iceberg $[[2m, 2m-2, 2]]$ code applied to a Toffoli circuit achieved beyond-break-even error detection on a leading trapped-ion quantum computer, where the effect of encoding a circuit with a quantum error-detection code enables increased fidelity compared to an unencoded circuit. This code was also applied to Bell state preparation circuits, where a lean non-fault-tolerant implementation of the Iceberg code enables a fidelity gain as well. This highlights the important point that, at least for small-scale circuits with a substantial portion of error-free runs, it can be effective simply to use error detection to filter out the runs with errors. Furthermore, experiments performed in this work highlight the necessity for judicious compilation of circuits not only for a given hardware but also within a quantum error detection code.

We implement a variational quantum algorithm for Gibbs state preparation of a transverse-field Ising model on IonQ's quantum computers. To this end, we train the variational parameters via classical simulation and perform state tomography on the quantum devices to evaluate the fidelity of the prepared Gibbs state. As a main result, we find that fidelity decreases (non-monotonically) as a function of the inverse temperature $β$ of the system. Fidelity also decreases as a function of the size of the system. Interestingly, we find that a Gibbs state prepared for a specified $β$ is a better representative of a Gibbs state prepared for a $\textit{lower}$ $β$; or in other words, thermal fluctuations in the quantum hardware lead to digital heating, that is, an increase in the temperature of the prepared Gibbs state above what was intended.