Development and experimental implementation of noise characterisation techniques on a superconducting quantum processor
Abstract
Noise characterisation not only enables error mitigation but also provides valuable information about the intrinsic performance of a quantum device, identifying dominant error contributions and bounding noise stability well beyond the aggregated calibration data. Deploying such methods on a specific hardware topology must combine efficiency and accuracy, assess noise stability, and validate the reconstructed noise model. Here we develop and implement these methods on a superconducting processor with square-lattice topology. First, we revise the cycle-benchmarking protocol and reduce the bias arising from unlearnable degrees of freedom via a regularised cost function. Second, we extend a previously developed tensor-network tomography method to match the device layout and show how its accuracy can be improved by repeated layer execution. Both methods allow approximate sublayer noise models to be extracted from parent ones. Using noise characterisation as a tool, we map the noise structure, track drift, and validate the adequacy of the learnt noise models against experimentally observed noisy estimations in benchmark physical and chemistry circuits. These results inform further improvements in the underlying technology and provide estimates of the size of noise-mitigated circuits that the device can support.
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BibTeX
@misc{fernandez2026development,
title = {{Development and experimental implementation of noise characterisation techniques on a superconducting quantum processor}},
author = {Nelson M. M. Fernández and Francesco Grieco and Hetta Vappula and Stefano Mangini and Boris Sokolov and Elsi-Mari Borrelli and Matteo A. C. Rossi and Sergey N. Filippov and N. Walter Talarico},
howpublished = {arXiv},
year = {2026},
month = oct,
doi = {10.48550/arxiv.2610.18000},
eprint = {2610.18000},
archivePrefix = {arXiv},
url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.18000},
}
RIS
TY - UNPB
TI - Development and experimental implementation of noise characterisation techniques on a superconducting quantum processor
AU - Nelson M. M. Fernández
AU - Francesco Grieco
AU - Hetta Vappula
AU - Stefano Mangini
AU - Boris Sokolov
AU - Elsi-Mari Borrelli
AU - Matteo A. C. Rossi
AU - Sergey N. Filippov
AU - N. Walter Talarico
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/10/13
PB - arXiv
DO - 10.48550/arxiv.2610.18000
UR - https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.18000
AB - Noise characterisation not only enables error mitigation but also provides valuable information about the intrinsic performance of a quantum device, identifying dominant error contributions and bounding noise stability well beyond the aggregated calibration data. Deploying such methods on a specific hardware topology must combine efficiency and accuracy, assess noise stability, and validate the reconstructed noise model. Here we develop and implement these methods on a superconducting processor with square-lattice topology. First, we revise the cycle-benchmarking protocol and reduce the bias arising from unlearnable degrees of freedom via a regularised cost function. Second, we extend a previously developed tensor-network tomography method to match the device layout and show how its accuracy can be improved by repeated layer execution. Both methods allow approximate sublayer noise models to be extracted from parent ones. Using noise characterisation as a tool, we map the noise structure, track drift, and validate the adequacy of the learnt noise models against experimentally observed noisy estimations in benchmark physical and chemistry circuits. These results inform further improvements in the underlying technology and provide estimates of the size of noise-mitigated circuits that the device can support.
ER -