Virtual distillation with noise dilution

Abstract

Virtual distillation is an error-mitigation technique that reduces quantum-computation errors without assuming the noise type. In scenarios where the user of a quantum circuit is required to additionally employ peripherals, such as delay lines, that introduce excess noise, we find that the error-mitigation performance can be improved if the peripheral, whenever possible, is split across the entire circuit; that is, when the noise channel is uniformly distributed in layers within the circuit. We show that under the multiqubit loss and Pauli noise channels respectively, for a given overall error rate, the average mitigation performance improves monotonically as the noisy peripheral is split~(diluted) into more layers, with each layer sandwiched between subcircuits that are sufficiently deep to behave as two-designs. For both channels, analytical and numerical evidence show that second-order distillation is generally sufficient for (near-)optimal mitigation. We propose an application of these findings in designing a quantum-computing cluster that houses realistic noisy intermediate-scale quantum circuits that may be shallow in depth, where measurement detectors are limited and delay lines are necessary to queue output qubits from multiple circuits.