Error accumulation in dissipative quantum circuits
Abstract
Present-day quantum processors are open systems in which dissipation and decoherence degrade the information carried by a quantum state as it propagates through a circuit. We study this degradation in dissipative random quantum circuits, modeling each two-qubit gate as a diluted unitary that interpolates between the intended unitary operation and a random dissipative quantum channel. Using the fidelity between the ideal and noisy output states as a diagnostic, we show that sufficiently random unitary gates or dissipative Kraus operators lead to a universal decay of the average fidelity. This decay is determined only by the dissipation strength, system size, and circuit depth, while microscopic details of the gates and noise, including the Kraus rank, appear only in subleading corrections to higher moments. We derive a closed-form expression for the average fidelity in terms of three physically meaningful error parameters, dissipation strength, coherent two-qubit gate-error strength, and connectivity-error probability. Finally, we identify the cases when dissipative effects can be reproduced by an unitary-noise model and when dissipation-induced decoherence remains distinguishable from coherent noise at the level of the average fidelity.
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BibTeX
@misc{buruaga2026error,
title = {{Error accumulation in dissipative quantum circuits}},
author = {Nadir Samos-Sáenz de Buruaga and Rodrigo M. C. Pereira and Karol Życzkowski and Sergey Denisov and Pedro Ribeiro},
howpublished = {arXiv},
year = {2026},
month = sep,
doi = {10.48550/arxiv.2609.01848},
eprint = {2609.01848},
archivePrefix = {arXiv},
url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.01848},
}
RIS
TY - UNPB
TI - Error accumulation in dissipative quantum circuits
AU - Nadir Samos-Sáenz de Buruaga
AU - Rodrigo M. C. Pereira
AU - Karol Życzkowski
AU - Sergey Denisov
AU - Pedro Ribeiro
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/09/01
PB - arXiv
DO - 10.48550/arxiv.2609.01848
UR - https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.01848
AB - Present-day quantum processors are open systems in which dissipation and decoherence degrade the information carried by a quantum state as it propagates through a circuit. We study this degradation in dissipative random quantum circuits, modeling each two-qubit gate as a diluted unitary that interpolates between the intended unitary operation and a random dissipative quantum channel. Using the fidelity between the ideal and noisy output states as a diagnostic, we show that sufficiently random unitary gates or dissipative Kraus operators lead to a universal decay of the average fidelity. This decay is determined only by the dissipation strength, system size, and circuit depth, while microscopic details of the gates and noise, including the Kraus rank, appear only in subleading corrections to higher moments. We derive a closed-form expression for the average fidelity in terms of three physically meaningful error parameters, dissipation strength, coherent two-qubit gate-error strength, and connectivity-error probability. Finally, we identify the cases when dissipative effects can be reproduced by an unitary-noise model and when dissipation-induced decoherence remains distinguishable from coherent noise at the level of the average fidelity.
ER -