Vicente Leyton-Ortega

In the burgeoning field of quantum computing, the precise design and optimization of quantum pulses are essential for enhancing qubit operation fidelity. This study focuses on refining the pulse engineering techniques for superconducting qubits, employing a detailed analysis of Square and Gaussian pulse envelopes under various approximation schemes. We evaluated the effects of coherent errors induced by naive pulse designs. We identified the sources of these errors in the Hamiltonian model's approximation level. We mitigated these errors through adjustments to the external driving frequency and pulse durations, thus, implementing a pulse scheme with stroboscopic error reduction. Our results demonstrate that these refined pulse strategies improve performance and reduce coherent errors. Moreover, the techniques developed herein are applicable across different quantum architectures, such as ion-trap, atomic, and photonic systems.

Adversarial learning represents a powerful technique for generating data statistics. Its successful implementation in quantum computational platforms is not straightforward due to limitations in connectivity, quantum operation fidelity, and limited access to the quantum processor for statistically relevant results. Constraining the number of quantum operations and providing a design with a low compilation cost, we propose a quantum generative adversarial network design that uses real Hilbert spaces as the framework for the generative model and a novel strategy to encode classical information into the quantum framework. We consider quantum generator and discriminator architectures based on a variational quantum circuit. We encode classical information by the stereographic projection, which allows us to use the entire classical domain without normalization procedures. For low-depth ansätze designs, we consider the real Hilbert space as the working space for the quantum adversarial game. This architecture improves state-of-the-art quantum generative adversarial performance while maintaining a shallow-depth quantum circuit and a reduced parameter set. We tested our design in a low resource regime, generating handwritten digits with the MNIST as the reference dataset. We could generate undetected data (digits) with just 15 epochs working in the real Hilbert space of 2, 3, and 4 qubits. Our design uses native quantum operations established in superconducting-based quantum processors and is compatible with ion-trapped-based architectures.

Although several models have been proposed towards assisting machine learning (ML) tasks with quantum computers, a direct comparison of the expressive power and efficiency of classical versus quantum models for datasets originating from real-world applications is one of the key milestones towards a quantum ready era. Here, we take a first step towards addressing this challenge by performing a comparison of the widely used classical ML models known as restricted Boltzmann machines (RBMs), against a recently proposed quantum model, now known as quantum circuit Born machines (QCBMs). Both models address the same hard tasks in unsupervised generative modeling, with QCBMs exploiting the probabilistic nature of quantum mechanics and a candidate for near-term quantum computers, as experimentally demonstrated in three different quantum hardware architectures to date. To address the question of the performance of the quantum model on real-world classical data sets, we construct scenarios from a probabilistic version out of the well-known portfolio optimization problem in finance, by using time-series pricing data from asset subsets of the S\&P500 stock market index. It is remarkable to find that, under the same number of resources in terms of parameters for both classical and quantum models, the quantum models seem to have superior performance on typical instances when compared with the canonical training of the RBMs. Our simulations are grounded on a hardware efficient realization of the QCBMs on ion-trap quantum computers, by using their native gate sets, and therefore readily implementable in near-term quantum devices.

Hybrid quantum-classical algorithms provide ways to use noisy intermediate-scale quantum computers for practical applications. Expanding the portfolio of such techniques, we propose a quantum circuit learning algorithm that can be used to assist the characterization of quantum devices and to train shallow circuits for generative tasks. The procedure leverages quantum hardware capabilities to its fullest extent by using native gates and their qubit connectivity. We demonstrate that our approach can learn an optimal preparation of the Greenberger-Horne-Zeilinger states, also known as "cat states". We further demonstrate that our approach can efficiently prepare approximate representations of coherent thermal states, wave functions that encode Boltzmann probabilities in their amplitudes. Finally, complementing proposals to characterize the power or usefulness of near-term quantum devices, such as IBM's quantum volume, we provide a new hardware-independent metric called the qBAS score. It is based on the performance yield in a specific sampling task on one of the canonical machine learning data sets known as Bars and Stripes. We show how entanglement is a key ingredient in encoding the patterns of this data set; an ideal benchmark for testing hardware starting at four qubits and up. We provide experimental results and evaluation of this metric to probe the trade off between several architectural circuit designs and circuit depths on an ion-trap quantum computer.