What does noise characterization look like in Mitiq?

[natestemen]

If we added some noise characterization in Mitiq, what would it do? How would users want to use this?

The grand goal (IMO) would be to characterize the noise enough to then run some sort of optimization algorithm to determine the best QEM technique for the user to use on their device. The first step of the process is learning something about the noise (anything really!). It's then a separate question as to write the aforementioned optimization algo.

Some basic ideas for an entry point in Mitiq:

• characterize the noise with something like https://www.pygsti.info/ (this is not scalable in the long run, but perhaps useful to people now to learn something about their noise)
• model the noise as pure depolarizing and determine its strength
• model the noise as pure dephasing and determine its strength
• pull down the error rates from IBM (and other providers if they exist)

Lets collect other ideas here, so throw them down (they don't have to be any good 😄).

[purva-thakre]

I agree with items 1 and 4.

Just putting these links here for a later discussion:

https://arxiv.org/abs/2307.08741

https://github.com/tempoCollaboration/OQuPy

[DustyChalk]

David Mazziotti described how he took "noiseprints" (noise fingerprints) of quantum computers from within a circuit by running a model. Perhaps we could either leverage the results of his work, or run simple circuits that exercised typical strings of gates to create our own database of noiseprints. This was before the days of logical qubits, I have no idea how that would map to logical qubits.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2104.14552

They've identified a previously unknown portion of the causes of noise to cosmic rays:
https://www.newscientist.com/article/2417786-quantum-computers-are-constantly-hampered-by-cosmic-rays/

[purva-thakre]

Here are my slides for the first discussion about planning the noise characterization RFC.

https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1y94bf3TTCZqm_I3jrFMtYj4P8gR9SGH3pACSDCKwzPk/edit?usp=sharing

[purva-thakre]

Link to the literature review document: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1mmjhP6LKcKDegnvmkkxMvbEHXrRlSUXsZ063sqwjFxk/edit?usp=sharing