Mitiq is an open-source toolkit for implementing error mitigation techniques on most current intermediate-scale quantum computers. It is developed by Unitary Fund with help from the broad quantum software community. Mitiq is compatible with quantum programs written for IBM Q’s Qiskit, Google’s Cirq, Rigetti’s PyQuil, and basically any other quantum circuit formalism thanks to conversions to OpenQASM. Researchers can mitigate their circuit by running it on noisy simulators or any real device. With Mitiq, it is possible to implement zero-noise extrapolation techniques, which can reduce errors integrating quantum circuit sampling with classical inference.[1]

Figure 1. The Quantum Error Mitigation

Figure 1 shows A large number of quantum error mitigation techniques have been proposed in recent literature (e.g. Temme et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 119, 180509 (2017) and Endo et al., J. Phys. Soc. Japan 90, 032001 (2021)), a fact which reflects the importance and timeliness of the subject. The ability to implement quantum error mitigation in a platform-independent manner is crucial for testing, advancing, and ultimately deploying these techniques in applications.

This is why a community of open-source developers and Unitary Fund are developing Mitiq, a Python toolkit for implementing quantum error mitigation on NISQ computers. Currently, Mitiq can be used to implement zero-noise extrapolation (ZNE), probabilistic error cancellation (PEC), and Clifford data regression (CDR) techniques on quantum circuits written in the Amazon Braket SDK, Cirq, pyQuil, or Qiskit.[2]

Quantum error mitigation

Quantum error mitigation refers to a series of techniques aimed at reducing (mitigating) the errors that occur in quantum computing algorithms. Unlike software bugs affecting code in usual computers, the errors which we attempt to reduce with mitigation are due to the hardware.

Quantum error mitigation techniques try to reduce the impact of noise in quantum computations. They generally do not completely remove it. Alternative nomenclature refers to error mitigation as (approximate) error suppression or approximate quantum error correction, but it is worth noting that error mitigation is distinctly different from error correction. Two leading error mitigation techniques implemented in Mitiq are zero-noise extrapolation and probabilistic error cancellation.[3]

Quantum error mitigation Important

The noisy intermediate-scale quantum (NISQ) era is characterized by short-depth circuits in which noise affects state preparation, gate operations, and measurement [5]. It is not possible to implement quantum error correcting codes on them due to the needed qubit number and circuit depth required by these codes. Error mitigation offers low-overhead methods to more accurately and reliably estimate observable values.

References:

1. https://quantumcomputingreport.com/tools/
2. https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/quantum-computing/exploring-quantum-error-mitigation-with-mitiq-and-amazon-braket/
3. https://mitiq.readthedocs.io/en/stable/guide/guide-error-mitigation.html

Cite this article:

Thanusri swetha J (2021), Quantum Error Mitigation, AnaTechMaz, pp.16