Genetic Algorithms based on Bhattacharyya Distance for Quantum Measurement Error Mitigation

Abstract

Quantum computing is a fascinating research area which promises a revolution in computing performance. Since the launch of the IBM Quantum Experience project in 2016, the research activities in this area are strongly increased. This project provides the public access to quantum processors composed of superconducting physical computing elements known as qubits. Unfortunately, qubits are sensitive to noise and, for this reason, quantum computation can be affected by errors. As a consequence, there is a strong emergence for so- called quantum error mitigation methods aimed to attenuate the quantum error as much as possible, without requiring a strong additional computational effort. Among the most error- prone operations, there is surely the quantum measurement. Conventionally, mitigation methods for quantum measurement error compute a so-called mitigation matrix capable of correcting results outputted by a quantum processor. In this paper, a new measurement error mitigation approach based on genetic algorithms whose fitness function uses Bhattacharyya distance is proposed to learn an appropriate mitigation matrix. As shown in the experimental session, the proposed measurement error mitigation method outperforms the traditional approach.