Experimental implementation of error mitigation for short-depth quantum circuits

Quantum simulation is believed to be one of the near-term applications of early quantum computers. These simulations involve the preparation of a quantum state using a short-depth quantum circuit and the measurement of expectation values of observables of interest. The accuracy of these expectation values is however affected by decoherence during state preparation. While the implementation of a fully-fault tolerant architecture is beyond the scope of near-term hardware, a technique for mitigating such errors that requires no additional quantum resources was recently proposed [arXiv:1612.02058]. In this approach, the quantum state preparation is stretched in time, and the associated measurements of the expectation values are used to extrapolate to their noise-free values, thereby improving the fidelity of the chosen observable, without error-correcting the quantum state. We present our progress towards the experimental implementation of this technique.