Idle Tomography

Characterizing performance of and errors in quantum computers is essential to enabling their reliable operation. Idle gates are one of the most common and important operations for a quantum computer. We introduce idle tomography, a protocol specially tailored to efficiently estimate the error weights of the idle process. Idle tomography is very efficient and can be done with very few circuits given a low-weight ansatz. It is also computationally efficient since the necessary data analysis is very simple. This efficiency is an important first step to enable important larger-scale characterizations of quantum processors to happen. SNL is managed and operated by NTESS under DOE NNSA contract DE-NA0003525.